"Buzz Club: News from Japan"
2001-07-01 until 2001-09-01
PS1 Contemporary Art Center
Long Island City, NY, USA United States of America

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Buzz Club: News from Japan, an exhibition exploring the urban sensibilities of contemporary Japanese media culture. This exhibition features works by more than 100 artists, commercial designers and anonymous makers of streetwise scenes who are directly involved with digital media or who use technology-based techniques and strategies to approach traditional artistic disciplines.

Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture, anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action figurines and models, electronic music and sound and light installations are all part of this exhibition. Curated by P.S.1 Adjunct Curator Kazue Kobata and filmmaker/critic David d’Heilly, Buzz Club: News from Japan is the largest exhibition of Japanese pop culture creators ever assembled outside of Japan.

In one Buzz Club gallery is a 70-foot-long beehive structure -- a humming metropolis of hexagonal cells that visitors can climb and enter. There, visitors can interact with everything from commercial video games to a meticulously hand-drawn panorama of Tokyo. The enormous honeycomb structure, made of 2.5’-wide hexagonal tubes made of structural cardboard, is a site for hundreds of customized installations that represent the diverse yet cohesive context of Japanese youth culture. Inside the hives, visitors will find unique works by young artists inspired by street culture. While each section of the hive forms an isolated, atomized world, these cells are structurally and conceptually interdependent.

A second gallery features five successive performance-based exhibitions by artists who cross and confound genres: works range from pop music acts and graphic installations to fashion remixing and large media art installations. This series of solo exhibitions by some of Japan's leading multidisciplinary pop culture creators will appear in two-week cycles. The Super Lover Animation Life, an installation by designer Hideyuki Tanaka, sets the artist’s sensationally popular Prince Tongha pop group (with performer Pierre Taki and DJ Tasaka) in a surreal landscape produced by their iconic Super Lovers clothing line. Electronic music and graphic design outfit Delaware will rehearse and perform Bit Map Beats daily in a room bedazzled with thousands of CD cases, each filled with strange icons, to create a massive pixelated mosaic. Cutting-edge fashion team Nakagawa Sochi presents New York Wearables Cut and Paste Re-Cycle, a public garment-making project that evolves as used clothes brought by visitors or collected through various events within the city are altered and remixed on site and displayed, then auctioned in the gallery. Gabin Ito, a legend in video game creation, presents Zero Gravity Sports for the IT Era, an inventive series of sports with rules that defy common sense and sensibility. Finally, Toshio Iwai, a leading media artist in Europe and Japan, will install Photon, an interactive media installation involving optical handheld musical devices that read lights installed in the gallery and produce them as sounds.

Several artists will contribute animations to a growing web-based component of Buzz Club: News from Japan, which will be accessible at www.ps1.org for the duration of the exhibition. Discussions, performances and activities related to this exhibition will held throughout the summer.

Some participating artists include: Hideyuki Tanaka, Pierre Taki, Delaware, Nakagawa Sochi, Gabin Ito, Toshio Iwai, Exonemo, Yuka Wake, Taka Furuhashi, Sousei Kazuki, Tycoon Graphics, Tugboat, TGV, Groovisions, Kouji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, Masaki Tamra, Ryota Kuwakubo, Hiroshige Fukuhara, Katsuya Terada, Midori Araki, Ages 5 & Up, Kyupi Kyupi, Tokiharu Noto, Stereotype Produkts, Keiji Ito, Taiyo Matsumoto, Takayuki Takeya, Kouki Hasei, Hironori Murai, Hanako Kunishi, Hitomi Uchikura, Dai Okazaki/Smelly, Nihon-Ishina and Motoshi Sato.

Buzz Club: News from Japan is organized by P.S.1’s Project Manager Howie Chen and Registrar Jeffrey Uslip. This exhibition is made possible in part by The Japan Foundation.

Related Links:

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