Dokkyaku

From George Angelidis: 

"In 1958 the painter Isson Tanaka relocated to Amami Ōshima, an island in the Ryukyus. Where in self-chosen isolation, his island life was devoted exclusively to his art. Having just a few supporters, the local population viewed him as an eccentric. Tanaka died in 1977 while his first solo show was in preparation.

Forty plus years later, in 2018, Seiha Kurosawa, Kanako Azuma and Hideki Umezawa create a video installation about Tanaka’s last years of his life on Amami Ōshima. The work, entitled “Dokkyaku” (tr. The Lone Visitor), shifts between the texture and materiality of Tanaka’s paintings in relation to the natural world of Amami Ōshima and its human and non-human inhabitants. The work invites viewers to understand—poetically—the artist’s sensitivity to nature and the expressivity of his works.

During his stay on Amami Ōshima, Hideki Umezawa recorded numerous field recordings to enter the spirit of Tanaka. Through recording Umezawa wanted to recreate a sort of simulated ecology of Tanaka’s mind – or more in general: of the painter’s mind. For this long-playing record, Umezawa reworks these sounds in dialogue with electronically generated sounds from his studio practice. On the flipside, Andrew Pekler, who has never actually visited Amami Ōshima, upon hearing Umezawa’s field recordings decides to - in the spirit of Isson Tanaka – create a dreamscape of the island’s diverse sonic phenomena. Of what could be.

Thus springs a work breathing a tension between site specific and creative imagination. With sounds echoing between the anecdotic and the imaginary. Two views of … is a sensitive and highly stylized interpretation of the natural ambiance of Amami Ōshima. Of a world that Isson Tanaka had also carefully studied. This record represents a painter at work. It is a way of seeing, outer and inner.

Pekler and Umezawa create an insular monograph of Isson Tanaka’s ghost. Or a more universal isolated world, for you to enter and take away things from freely. Generous.

Link:

Dokkyaku