HIKARU SUZUKI / REIJI SAITO

Artist bio

Video screening
July 8 - 30, 2017
Opening reception: Saturday, July 8, 6-8pm

Special screening：Admission free / 30 seats

Sunday, July 16, 15:00 -
REIJI SAITO, CHAI SIRIS, HIKARU SUZUKI, GOZO YOSHIMASU
Saturday, July 29, 15:00 -
FUTOSHI MIYAGI, HIROYUKI OKI, REIJI SAITO, HIKARU SUZUKI, PHILIP WIDMANN

Cooperation: OSIRIS, SCAI THE BATH HOUSE, URANO

KAYOKOYUKI is pleased to announce the group exhibition with Hikaru Suzuki and Reiji Saito, consists of two new video works. For two days during the exhibition period (Sun, June 16 and June 29), poet Gozo Yoshimasu, Berlin-based filmmaker Philip Widmann, contemporary artist Hiroyuki Oki, Futoshi Miyagi and Chai Siris, will join the screening event. Chai Siris’s solo exhibition will be held at Komagome SOKO, adjacent to the gallery.

Hikaru Suzuki and Reiji Saito share common ground in the creative process where they tenderly watch daily surroundings according to their own lights, and transform these observations (sometimes painfully) into original expressions, although they show clear contrast in terms of methods and stances upon creation. Also, both of the artists originate their expressions on an interest in human existence, including their own.

While based on methods of documentary video, Hikaru Suzuki joins facts and fictions to provoke slight distortion within the realistic world while causing a faint feeling of strangeness to its viewers. With a delicate observation on human behavior, Suzuki digs complex specialties and dramatic stories out of our fast-moving day-to-day world and explores these findings to detect cues for reaching the truth for himself, or everyone else, through his artistic production.

Reiji Saito takes various close-up images of everyday subjects which exist within his reach and creates a video that represents the transient images of the events engraved at the bottom of his memory. Saito continues to shoot and record his daily life on a routine basis as if writing a diary. In the process of transforming these materials into video artwork, he sticks meticulously to present nothing but the surface of the recorded events, with the view to strip off the meaning or value which are supposed to be contained within them. That is probably why Saito’s video artwork, produced by sequencing the record (i.e. memory) of his daily life, appears as the naked, highly purified expression of the artist’s life and silently sneaks into the viewer’s consciousness with some sense of lightness.

We spend our ordinary lives while feeling or thinking something through seeing ever-changing scenery. When doing so, we select our viewpoints unconsciously and the views vary from person to person. Please enjoy the compelling possibility of rediscovering such obvious but normally overlooked facts through experiencing the video artwork of the two artists.

Hikaru Suzuki was born in Fukushima in 1984.
Suzuki has been invited to renowned festivals such as ART AWARD TOKYO 2008, Media Art Film Festival in Tokyo, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2015, image forum 2017, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin and WRO art center in Wroclaw, Poland etc. Lives and works in Berlin.
http://hikarusuzuki.tumblr.com/

Reiji Saito was born in 1987 in Tokyo, Japan.
Recently, Saito presented his work in "#18-4" at switch point, Tokyo, 2016, " Saito Reiji Video Screening " at Hyslom Studio, Kyoto, 2016, " Altenative Choice " at Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Kanagawa, 2015, " One Day Screening Reiji Saito / Shoko Toda " at TANA Studio, Kanagawa, 2014, "Ongoing Film Festival 2014" at Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2014, " COVERED TOKYO: Hikarie, 2014 " at Shibuya Hikarie 8F, Tokyo, 2014. Lives and works in Tokyo.
http://reijisaito.com/Top.html