CCJ is pleased to share four works by video artist Morihiro Wada over March and April, introduced by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens.
Each program will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform for CCJ members.
March & April Members’ Viewing: Morihiro Wada
Introduction by Nina Horisaki-Christens
Morihiro Wada was one of the youngest artists to participate in the first wave of 1970s video pioneers. Having entered Tama Art University in 1969, the start of his artistic training coincided with a campus shutdown due to the waves of student protests sweeping Japanese universities. This was also the height of Mono-ha's influence in the art academy and the era in which the seminal art critic, Dada-specialist, and media theory proponent Tōno Yoshiaki ran a seminar at Tama Art University. Wada's own interests veered toward the intersection of cognition, image, language, and material. Influenced by books including Takaaki Yoshimoto's Kyōdo gensōron, Wataru Hiromatsu's Kyōdo shukanteki sonzai kōzō, the writings of J. M. G Le Clézio and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Wittgenstein's version of phenomenology, he was particularly concerned with processes of perception and disjunctures between the individual and the collective. Upon meeting Canadian artist Michael Goldberg in 1971 and being introduced to the video camera, he eagerly took up the medium as a tool for exploring the act of seeing as a means of exploring perception and intersubjective relations. As Wada wrote in 2005, "the closed-circuit structure in which the world, perceived through the eye of the video camera, was recorded on tape then returned via feedback was, itself, reminiscent of human thought patterns." As a video artist, Wada participated in exhibitions and screenings organized by the 1970s collective Video Hiroba, maintained a friendship with Mako Idemitsu, and taught video classes at the Yokohama alternative art school B-Zemi.
Still, Morihiro Wada's works are rarely confined to a single medium. Within the works included in the March and April screenings, we see Wada using photography, film, video, and video synthesizers, but Wada also worked with sound, painting, installation, and sculpture, often in combination with each other. Through this multi-media approach, Wada placed the materiality of different media in juxtaposition, experimenting with how the physical properties of a given material affected the subjects mediated by these media. He played with the materiality of language as both text and sound, the limits of perception by naming objects presented as images re-mediated several times over, and conventions of moving image composition including singular vanishing points, slow pans, zooms, and layering of picture-in-picture inserts. This combination of conceptual and material interests drew critics such as Arata Tani to Wada's work and earned him a place in shows at the Centre Pompidou, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and The Kassel International Art Exhibition in the 1980s and '90s.
The Recognition Construction’75 / 認知構造’75 ｜1975, 22:38 min, video, color, sound
Although this video, originally shot on a U-matic cassette, begins in a studio setting, the action focuses on a short walk through Shibuya. During this walk, Wada swings the camera around to focus on specific details of the surrounding environment. Both in the studio and during the walk, Wada names what he is looking at, first by stating, "I look at the camera" (in the studio), then by aligning his view with that of the camera, naming the details on which his wandering lens lands. This video walk is played back on a monitor (a return to the studio?), recognizable by the desaturated color and tinny quality of the sound despite the camera frame more or less aligning with the monitor. The identifications recorded in the video are repeated by Wada in the studio, causing them to become slightly offset from the camera's movement. As this mediation process repeats several more times, the image quality gradually degrades. At the same time, the identifications of the objects captured by the camera are further offset, creating disjunctures between perception and identification as well as image and language reminiscent of the disconnect between experience and memory.
The Recognition Construction №XIII Variation’85 / 認知構造№XIII 変奏’85 ｜1985, 15:48 min, video, color, sound
This U-matic video incorporates a number of frequent images from Wada's oeuvre: a camera advancing down a colonnaded pedestrian walkway beneath an elevated train line, the figure of a woman with her back to the camera retreating down a street toward a vanishing point by walking or running, and various seascapes. These scenes are spliced together in seemingly random order, sometimes inserted into each other or reshot through close-ups of video monitors. At times the footage is so heavily mediated and re-mediated that images blur into shadow and light, disappear into CRT phosphor dots, or shift hues and patterns from oversaturation and noise. A soundtrack by Hideki Yoshida accompanies the entire sequence, featuring echoing electronic patterns and long tones interspersed with ambient sounds of traffic and beachfront waves. This work was first screened at the Worldwide Video Festival in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands, in 1986.
Nina Horisaki-Christens
Dr. Horisaki-Christens is a sculptor, an art historian, and a freelance curator with PhD in Art History from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the 1970s Tokyo-based collective Video Hiroba and histories of media and art in Asia and the Asian diaspora. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for her dissertation research, completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, and has taught at both Columbia and Fordham Universities.