When he was still in high school, Imai Norio became the youngest member of the Japanese avant-garde art group Gutai in 1965 and remained a member until the group disbanded in 1972. In the late 1960s, he began to treat moving images as both “material” and conceptual objects; from the 1970s onwards, he introduced experimental video pieces that combined photography and performance art. This artwork contemplates a city that has been engulfed by images promoting consumerism which flooded Japan’s mass media in the 1970s. The artist photographed random found images of society he encountered in women’s magazines, weekly photo magazines and television, using a 35mm color slide projector to enlarge them onto a paper attached to the wall, then recording a performance in which he traced along the outlines of the projected images. Since the slide projector advanced every fifteen seconds, only a portion of each image can be drawn quickly. The composite image that resulted from repeating this process for 20 minutes offers a small glimpse of daily urban life conveyed through the accumulation of visual fragments.
