Sobyo/Eizo (Sketches/Images)

Imai Norio

Imai Norio, Sobyo/Eizo (Sketches/Images), 1973/2021. Single channel video, color, sound. 20 min 19 sec. ©️ Norio Imai. Courtesy of ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka

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.

Imai Norio (b. 1946, Osaka)

Since the very start of his artistic career, Norio Imai has challenged the dogma of artistic convention. He attracted attention with his white reliefs with protrusions and holes made on the surface of canvas, and his works using industrial materials brought a new style to Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde artist group. He began working in photography and video in the late 1960’s and he is also recognized as one of the leading early video art artists in Japan. Public collections include Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and Getty Research Institute, L.A., and others.

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