Encompassing documentary, fiction, and comedy skits, Atsushi Yamamoto's videos explore the artist's perception of reality as he encounters and reacts to the world around him.
Read MoreAfter graduating with a BFA in Painting from Tama Art University, Tokyo in 2003, Yamamoto relocated to Berlin. The artist now lives and works in Tokyo.
While living in Berlin, Yamamoto was inspired by Bruce Nauman's multidisciplinary and conceptual practice to shift from painting to video, working with the medium's temporal and spontaneous qualities.
Yamamoto's videos vary in duration and genre, with an emphasis on the experience of life. The expected betrayal (2010) revolves around a classic comedy scene, in which a man fails to notice a banana peel on the floor in his rushed attempt to catch a train. In the short video 2 dogs (2010), two toy dogs mounted on motorised wheels are each controlled by two young men, seated on a sidewalk.
Yamamoto's work can also be personal, such as the documentary of his visit to an old girlfriend during his wife's pregnancy, titled THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT (2016), or drawn from his surroundings as with I (2019–2020). Made during his year-long stay in Hue, Vietnam in 2018, the video shows the artist in the midst of rice fields, rowing a small boat.
Upon his return to Japan, and in the midst of a pandemic, Yamamoto began to consider the notion of home and the relationships resulting from it. In a short poem written by the artist in 2022, he asks, 'When I come to question whether my home is in fact my home, how likely is it that my home may be your home?'
Ideas surrounding home are central to Yamamoto's solo exhibition My Home is Not Your Home at ShugoArts, Tokyo, which includes I and other works made in Vietnam and Japan.
Atsushi Yamamoto's work has been screened in both solo and group presentations.
Solo exhibitions include My Home is Not Your Home, ShugoArts, Tokyo (2022); Forms of Pray, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2020); MAM screen 007: Yamamoto Atsushi, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017).
Group exhibitions include DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow, National Art Center, Tokyo (2021); How to live #2 at Roppongi, ShugoArts, Tokyo (2018); The National Cinema, Okutama, National Museum of Art, Okutama (2016).
Yamamoto's website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
