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Indepth Arts News:
"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.
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