Born in 1977 in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. Tamura is primarily an installation and video artist who broke out in 2010 with a highly acclaimed work Nightless, a film composed entirely of stills from Google Street View. Tamura has a BFA from the Department of Photography at Nihon University from 2003 but his interest in expanding on the possibilities of the still image led him to study Film and New Media at the Tokyo University of the Arts where he graduated in 2010 with a Ph.D. His video, installation and participation-driven works, which have been exhibited around Europe and Asia, play with the interaction between the artwork, art space and the viewer. However, much of his work still betrays his background in photography in the aesthetic, his meticulous recording of the event, and his attempts to push the boundaries of the still image.
Read MoreIn the series Nightless, of which there are currently 11 site-specific versions according to where it is to be exhibited, he stitches together images from Google Street View into a meandering and narrative-less road movie. Neither does the audio—either his own voice, or more often simply audio taken from You Tube—attempt to organize the film into a cohesive narrative, yet, once the side-streets, buildings, cars and the occasional pedestrian begin flying past like an endless landscape scroll, one forms anyway. Just as the Google Car once drove these streets without a particular sense of purpose other than to record the surroundings, Tamura navigates these same roads without an apparent motive, leaving us to fill it in. This is a film where he has, as much as humanly possible, removed himself from the film-making process allowing our own subjectivity take over.
He expanded on the techniques, themes and the viewer-involvement in his first solo show in 2012 titled Nightland, in which the installation referenced various themes of human travel in all its forms and purposes; from automobile, rail and air-travel, vacations, pilgrimages and crusades. The visitor was invited to view the latest Nightless film from the comfort of a bed, covered with a quilt made from various blankets from commercial airliners. In a touch typical to Tamura, he outsourced the making of the quilt. Meanwhile, the gallery walls were adorned with framed pieces of what at first appear to be abstract paintings, but are in fact segments of airline blankets, along with a proverb regarding travel from the country of that airline.
In 2013, Yuichiro Tamura held his second solo show, and the first one overseas, at Art Basel, Hong Kong. Titled NIGHTLESS/Last Signing Room, besides creating a unique version of Nightless of the streets of Hong Kong, Last Signing Room is an installation that brings together the same subjectivity and act of creating something unique from the mundane, with an added layer of historical awareness. Last Signing Room—a reference to the 1842 Treaty of Nanking between China and the UK—tells the history of Hong Kong on the surface of a wooden table (from the popular Japanese chain store Muji, which is popular for its minimalist design and “no-brand” policy). The inscriptions on the table were carved by a local Hong Kong artisan who makes funerary engravings. Ever the documentarian, Tamura records the creation of the work in a 15-minute video that shows the table in its box outside the engraver’s shop, the act of carving, curious passers-by, serving tea inside the shop, and even negotiating the price, thereby literally exposing his creative process.
Yuichiro Tamura is gaining an international presence, receiving a grant in 2014 for a residency at the Pola Art Foundation in Berlin, and in 2013 he was selected for the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artist to study at the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin and the University of Arts, London. His work is in the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and his alma mater, the Tokyo University of the Arts.
Text by Ruben van Mansum
