Artist Highlight: Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver

Since 2017, CCJ has been working with artist Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, first at an Artist Talk organized by CCJ and Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia. We are excited to continue our working relationship as we prepare our presentations of Gulliver’s works this spring:

• Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination at The Museum of Modern Art (March 28-April 26, 2020)

• Gulliver’s performance “し-C-4 (shi-C-4)” as part of More Than Cinema exhibition at Pioneer Works (April 1, 2020)

• Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver: De-Time at Haverford College (April 9-May 15, 2020)

Here are highlights of our past projects with him.

Interview: Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver

As part of the Japanese Expanded Cinema research thread, CCJ partners Go Hirasawa and Hiroko Tasaka interviewed artist Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver in 2017. Hiroko Tasaka organized the exhibition Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017, which included Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination (1968-1969). Go Hirasawa was a major contributor to the exhibition.

Artist Talk: Gulliver

Presentation about his film practice of late-1960s. Organized by Collaborative Cataloging Japan and co-presented with Vox Populi Gallery on February 19, 2017.

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver

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Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver (b. 1947, Shiga) is an artist with a multidisciplinary practice. As a high school student, he formed the artist collectives The Play and Remandaran and staged on-street performances of a conceptual nature in Kyoto and Osaka. Living between Tokyo and the Kansai region in the late-1960s, he began to attract the attention of the media and was considered to be a representative figure of the hippie (fūten) phenomenon, going by the nickname Gulliver, which he continues to keep as his artist name. In 1967, he presented a series of conceptually driven films at the discotheque L.S.D in Tokyo. Together with Rikuro Miyai, he began presenting film in Tokyo jazz clubs, such as Pit Inn and Noa Noa as well as at events organised by the Art Film Association in Kyoto and Osaka. As a participant of the Intermedia Art Festival at the discotheque Killer Joe’s, Tokyo, in 1969, Gulliver presented Cinematic Illumination (1968-69), a work involving eighteen slide projectors that illuminated the unique 360-degree environment. The outdoor performance Flying Focus (1969) involved a tubular balloon into which Gulliver projected coloured patterns using an overhead projector. Since, he has continued to remain active as an artist working in the fields of sculpture, performance and new media with an interest in the body, scale and humour. He is represented by Tajana Pieters (Ghent) and Aoyama Meguro (Tokyo) and has performed or exhibited his work recently at Tate Modern and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.