- Date
04.27.2021 (Tue.)
- Location
JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles YouTube Channel
The groundbreaking interdisciplinary MA: Space-Time in Japan exhibition was curated in the late 1970s by renowned architect, Arata Isozaki. It presented Japanese artistic culture through the unifying concept of MA found in painting, photography, theater, performance, music, sculpture, architecture and daily life in Japan, making explicit an implicit indigenous notion of order and orientation found in the simultaneity of time and space.
JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles and architecture professors Hitoshi Abe (University of California Los Angeles) and Ken Tadashi Oshima (University of Washington) are presenting a series of four webinars focusing on the application of MA in a variety of cultural spheres. The series begins with ART in the spring, followed by ARCHITECTURE in the summer. In the autumn the webinar will spotlight FOOD, followed by MUSIC in the winter.
This first webinar examines the application of MA in the realm of contemporary art. Takashi Kudo of the international art collective, teamLab, shares video footage of three separate examples of digital installations created by the team. Professors Hitoshi Abe and Ken Tadashi Oshima, hosts of the series, moderated the conversation with Kudo, to explore how the idea of MA, or time/space consciousness, has been incorporated into and shaped teamLab’s digital creations. The webinar concludes with an audience Q&A.
*To watch the video in full screen, please click on the image above, then click on the YouTube icon on the lower right-hand corner.
Recording Available
The recording can be viewed within this event page or on the official JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles YouTube Channel.
Guest Speaker
Takashi Kudo
Takashi Kudo is Communications Director for teamLab, an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects.
Founded in 2001, teamLab seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. The collective aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world and new perceptions through art. In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perception of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and of the continuity of time. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life.
Panelists
Hitoshi Abe
Hitoshi Abe is Principal at AHA (Atelier Hitoshi Abe), an architectural design firm based in the U.S. and Japan. He is also a professor in the department of Architecture and Urban Design and Director of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, both at UCLA.
Ken Tadashi Oshima
Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where he teaches in the areas of trans-national architectural history, theory, and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and taught at Columbia University and the University of British Columbia.
He earned an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, in East Asian Studies and Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College, M. Arch. degree from U. C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Columbia University. From 2003-5, he was a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in London.
Dr. Oshima’s publications include Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and Sea (Lars Müller/Harvard GSD, 2015), Architecturalized Asia (University of Hawaii Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2013), GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Toto, 2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) and Arata Isozaki (Phaidon, 2009). He curated “Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake” (Harvard GSD, 2012), “SANAA: Beyond Borders”” (Henry Art Gallery 2007-8), and co-curator of “Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond” (University of Pennsylvania, UC Santa Barbara, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, 2006-7). He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2016-18 and was an editor and contributor to Architecture + Urbanism for more than ten years, co-authoring the two-volume special issue, Visions of the Real: Modern Houses in the 20th Century (2000). His articles on the international context of architecture and urbanism in Japan have been published in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Review, Architectural Theory Review, Kenchiku Bunka, Japan Architect, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and the AA Files.
teamLab, Exhibition view of MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, 2018, Odaiba, Tokyo © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery
Rethinking of MA Webinar Series
teamLab, Exhibition view of Every Wall is a Door, 2021, Superblue Miami © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery
Check Event
Kogakuin University 125th Memorial Education Center, designed by Chiba Manabu Architects, constructed 2012. Photo by Masao Nishikawa Check Event
Related Program
Rethinking of MA: Space - Time 2020
Related Article
The Space in Between | A Perspective on the Japanese Concept of Ma