Koizumi Meiro plays with variations on his own persona as an artist. He shows the process of searching for overlapping relationships and inherent meaning within the relationship between the history of a group (symbolized as a nation) and the individual self. Koizumi confronts particular aspects of history such as hysteria and violence along with the inherent contradiction and incompleteness of modern society by creating moving images of his performances or those of other actors. Variations on keywords such as “group,” “individual,” and “memories” are the basis for the artist’s four works presented in Media City Seoul 2010.
Melodrama for Men #1 is about people who committed hara-kiri after the defeat of the Japanese army in World War II. The artist re-creates the entire thought process behind the suicides in a symbolic performance with maximized sexual implications. Here, the spectrum of emotions, including the innate defeat in the war and masculinity, death, honor and self-intoxication, is explicitly exposed.
Portrait of a Young Samurai is a piece about Japanese Imperial history that depicts the repetitive phrases of gratitude and farewells spoken by a young pilot immediately before flying off for a kamikaze mission. The third person, positioned offscreen, persistently pushes the young pilot to the extreme until he breaks down to the point of tears after the physical and mental energy is exhausted. This group of works reveals the human organism exposed “as is” at the precise moment when the physical senses and psychological and mental climaxes unite and the boundary between the rational and the irrational dissipates.
