Shadows exist on surfaces as pure image without detail, colour or mass. Immaterial, elusive and ungraspable, they were mistrusted by Plato as representing fraudulent imitations of reality, distractions from truth and knowledge. To be liberated, the prisoners in his cave would have to come outside and face the fully dimensioned world of sunlight – the opposite of darkness, the antithesis of deception. But actually light and dark exist only in and through each other – a shadow needs a source of light from which to be cast and stars cannot be seen in the day because only darkness gives form to light. Arlo Guthrie said in a few words what Samuel Todes and others have said in many: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in”.

For Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent installation at Gallery αM in Tokyo, the Osaka-born Berlin-based artist likened the configuration of the basement gallery space to those enclosed subterranean realms never reached by daylight, caves. With this as his starting point, he created an interwoven, participatory system of shadows, lights, found domestic junk precariously arranged, and ongoing photo documentation. It seemed to extend in several directions from Tu m’ (1918), where some of Duchamp’s icons – the wheel and hatstand – were used to “do a painting with cast shadow” by way of exploring the relationship between two dimensionality and three dimensionality, image and thing.

Plato thought the light of the sun was the ultimate, unpolluted truth and anything else was secondary, but as this exhibition showed, the relationship between light and authenticity is more conflicted than we might assume. The nature of light is such that it can be propagated through projection and reflection endlessly without suffering any loss to the source. The moon, for example has no light of its own; its illumination is a forgery, borrowed from the sun. In the intricately built space the illegitimate shadows of Plato’s cave became their own authentic fakes, independent of sunlight and indifferent to the notion of originality.

The title of the show, Cave, was projected near the entrance to the gallery via a methodically placed hand-mirror that picked up light from outside the room. Second-hand light was also recorded live by camcorder and transmitted to a projector which then cast the shadow of a representation of a horse from the Lascaux complex of caves (estimated to be 17,000 years old) via a page from a second-hand book of reproductions. Sources of origin were consciously made indistinguishable from the interacting forms of reproduction.

As with the young artist’s other recent performative installations, a camera sat on a tripod for the duration of the show silently working away at time-lapse documentation of the perpetually incomplete set-up. The thousands of photographic images will later be compiled in an autonomous stop-motion video work, forming yet another layer of representation. Besides the common analogy of photography and shadows (dating way back Fox Talbot who described the first photographic images as skiagraphy, meaning ‘shadow writing’), the camera’s presence brought to mind Susan Sontag’s statement that the power of photography has “de-Platonized our understanding of reality”, making it no longer plausible to distinguish between images and objects, shadows and realities, copies and originals.

In one corner of Taguchi’s cave the passing of time was documented by the shifting shadows of a tall, single stem pink tiger lily that stood in an emptied wine bottle on the floor before a spot light. On the first day of the exhibition the artist traced the cast silhouette of the freshly cut flower on the wall in pencil, and over the weeks that followed the growing distance between these marks and those of the real live shadows made evident the drooping flowers’ more salubrious past, as well as their imminent extinction. It was a simple gesture of marking duration, and death, through the interplay of artist’s impression of shadows and ‘original’ shadows.

While at first glance it appeared to be a cacophonous and arbitrary arrangement, the evolving space was executed with great skill, exactitude and wit. As with any visual trace of a shadow, what it amounted to was a representation of a representation, but under Taguchi’s apt hands the reconfiguration of time, layering of shadows and interweaving of copies ensured any pretence of originality (the sun) was eclipsed.

Photographs by Amelia Groom

With all the global location recces and talent scouting done from the convenience of his own bedroom, Yuichiro Tamura brilliantly exploits new possibilities of Google Maps in his Nightless film series. Thousands of gritty screen grabs are taken from Street View and brought together to form open-ended narratives based on interviews the artists does with people about their lives, accompanied by audio lifted from Youtube. These are images without authors – taken by artificial satellites far far away – and remixed with found sound to tell found stories, they question the basis of artistic authorship.

Installation view from Yuichiro’s exhibition at Tokyo Wonder Site, where he is now completing a one-year residency.

An exhibition I curated on a recent Japan Foundation residency in Tokyo, Spooky Action at a Distance is open at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney for the next two weeks. With recent video works presented in a multi-screen instillation, the show presents a diverse selection of Japanese artists, each of them being shown in Australia for the first time.

There’s the body hacking of Daito Manabe, the strange world of the faceless dance ensemble KATHY, the Super Rat escapades of the controversial Chim↑Pom collective, culinary absurdity from Crazy Hat & Long Ear, kinetic banality from Tetsushi Higashino, reconfigured animalia from Ine wo Ueru hito, deft stop-motion transformation of floors and furniture by Yukihiro Taguchi, and the home made adventures of the self-proclaimed “masters of girl magic”, Kiiiiiii. For individual information on the spooks click on the images below:

Crazy Hat & Long Ears is a duo formed last year by Tama Arts University students Ryoko Iwata and Saki Akiyama. Their Lewis Caroll-esque video works Our full courses and The law of the jungle on the table feature eating, glorious messiness, jungles on tables and general culinary absurdity. Check them out at Spooky Action at a Distance, opening this Friday at Black & Blue Gallery to coincide with the Kirin Big In Japan event on Wednesday. As Ryoko and Saki say, “let’s eat happy”.

Fellow Osakans Tomoko Inagaki and Takuma Uematsu first paired up on the occasion of a group exhibition called I meet … , which showcased various artist collaborations. They hadn’t initially intended to form a unit, but the experience of working together was so rewarding that they decided to join artistic forces, under the moniker Ine wo Ueru hito (meaning “person who plants rice” and incorporating both their names INagaki and UEmatsu).

“The concept of Ine wo Ueru hito is to remove ego and think beyond ourselves,” the artists say. “Usually artists work and think individually. We are both also individual artists and think individually, but in this unit we try to produce work by thinking about and caring for the other. We don’t fight and cherish the process of making the works peacefully.”

Their first collaborative works One day, I meet… Parts 1 + 2 were exhibited in Tokyo at HPGRP Gallery and Nadiff last month, and from next week they will be shown at Spooky Action at a Distance, the Big In Japan exhibition of Japanese video art opening at Black & Blue Gallery on December 4 from 6pm. Combining sculpture, illustration and performance, the two part video is teeming with visual trickery, reconfigured animals and the strangely comforting relentless mundanely of vacuuming.

The latest from the City of Yokohama’s urban renewal initiative Creative City Yokohama is the CREAM International Festival for Arts and Media. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier forming the main venues, the festival is spread around with various satellite exhibitions taking place in the recently regenerated former red-light district Koganecho, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo – confirming the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instigating innovative new uses of existing city spaces.

Not to be missed is the Lab Space at the end of the Shinko Pier venue, which brings together various groups and individual artists with a focus on interaction through workshops, discussions, lectures, and an open café area. Highlights include an extensive collection of artworks and documents from the Japanese artist-activist collective Remo and the recent experiments of Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), an organization dedicated to making new tools and techniques available for urban communication and public interventions around the world.

The problem the festival faces with being so dispersed is that it is extremely difficult for visitors who aren’t local residents to navigate their way around. Suitable signage, connecting transportation and concise information about the different spaces would help overcome this, but they all seem to be lacking at CREAM 2009, leaving many visitors confused or frustrated.

This is one of the points that has been raised in the debate that has been taking place in the wake of the controversial media preview, where Masaki Fujihata – participating artist, member of the festival committee and professor at Tokyo University of Fine Arts – formally withdrew his participation and handed out a written statement of complaint about the CREAM Director and various facets of the way the festival had been put together (more details on that here).

But despite the Fujihata controversy, the problems with the scattered venues and the wishy-washyness of the overarching “Deep Images” theme, the range of artists and standard of works (with several highlights listed below) make CREAM a worthwhile daytrip out of Tokyo. Perhaps it is just better to consider it as a series of exhibitions rather than an overarching festival with some connecting idea behind it, and to use it as an excuse to get aquatinted with the city of Yokohama, one of Japan’s most interesting new hubs for contemporary art (more on that here).

Behind the scenes of Indonesian artist Eko Nugrohu’s electrically powered shadow puppets.

Horticulture by Osaka-based artist-activist collective Remo.

Shiga Leiko’s Canary (2007), a slideshow of her powerful photography.

Alfredo Jaar’s representative work The Sound of Silence (2006).

From Duane Hopkins captivating multi-screen video installation Sunday (2009).

(Above and below) SHIMURABROS. and Taro Izumi’s mixed-media invasion of the Polar Bear House at the Nogeyama Zoological Garden.

An animalistic audiovisual installation from Makoto Nomura and Yukihiro Nomura, held in an old streetcar at the Nogeyama Zoological Garden.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

An omnibus video work compiling several restrained kinetic scenarios that celebrate the ordinary and banal, Tetsushi Higashino’s KINE (above) will be presented at the upcoming Big In Japan exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance. Like all his experiments, it uses the materials of daily life as both media and message. The artist’s other ongoing works in progress include Hydroponic Nose Hair, an attempt to grow a plucked nose hair in water, and Pnoom (below), which sees him sneak around the neighbourhood on garbage collection day, making temporary stacked towers out of empty cans.

For more on Tetsushi see here and here.

When Yukihiro Taguchi (aka Yuki) started out exhibiting installation work, he found himself compelled to alter and evolve the arrangements continually for the duration of his shows. He then realised that his photographic documentation of the changes had a particular interest of their own, and that led to his current practice of performative installation.

Elaborate rearrangements of things are documented by thousands of pictures taken on stop-motion, thereby forming endless reconfigurations of space and time. For his recent exhibition at his Tokyo gallery Mujin-to Productions, Yuki conducted one of his ‘performative sketches’ from the other side of the world. Every nook and cranny of the tiny room (tiny even by Tokyo standards) was covered with his idiosyncratic drawings, including new ones which were sent to the gallery by fax daily from the artist’s base in Berlin. The process was documented by a camera set on automatic in the room, and the images taken will form a video work at a later date.

Other recent projects have applied a similar concept to outdoor public spaces (which Yuki says is much easier to do in Berlin, where the regulation of city space is infinitely more lax than it is in Japan). His acclaimed Moment series, for example, saw him take the wooden boards from a gallery floor and place them in endlessly evolving configurations all over the city – with the third and most recent volume in the series completed in Rio de Janeiro.

While the artist is never seen in the works, his presence is always evident. It is physically demanding stuff, requiring weeks or sometimes months of consistent manual labour and patience. But the results are fascinating, always forcing us to reconsider our relationships to our surroundings.

Yuki recalls that when he returned the floorboards to the gallery floor after taking them away on various adventures for four weeks, the residents of the building and anyone who had visited the installation during the project felt that the boards seemed strangely unnatural back in their original context, as if being removed from their location and function had fundamentally altered them. He took this as confirmation that new relationships with our daily landscapes and material surrounds can and should be explored.

Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent ‘performative sketch’ installation at Mujin-to in Tokyo.

In an earlier series of works, Yuki held gatherings in bubbles and documented their slow deflation.

Floor boards sneaking away and getting up to mischief around Berlin.

With new energy and expression being granted to everyday things like floors, furniture and air, the allure of Yuki’s work is that of the ancient art form of puppetry; making the inanimate animate and creating life from lifelessness.

Yukihiro Taguchi is one of seven Japanese artists to have video work included in Spooky Action at a Distance, opening at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney at 6pm on December 4, and running until December 19.

Nagi Noda’s death on September 7 2008 robbed the world of an unbridled imagination that fed on surrealist pop and hilarious, super-kawaii fantasy. Lest we forget. Not that we could even if we wanted to: everything she touched became infused with her idiosyncratic, candy-coloured exuberance, leaving a vivid impression on all who were exposed to her work.

A film director, graphic designer, toy maker, art director and fashion designer, Nagi was born in Tokyo and spent 5 years in New York before returning to Japan in ‘87. She worked as a multi-disciplinary new media artist for various projects and exhibitions; created ad campaigns for clients including the La Foret department store in Harajuku, Nike and Coca Cola; started a fashion label with artist Mark Ryden, made countless music videos for the likes of Cut/Copy, Scissor Sisters and Japanese pop star Yuki, and made the amazing hair hats pictured below.

Her passing at age 35 was apparently due to complications from surgery she had after a car accident the year before. Sheila Stepanek, CEO of her agency Partizan, reported that the she died “in her Mark Ryden dress, Chanel boots and perfect make-up with Viktor & Rolf lace black eye lashes.”

Surely the most narcissistic of all mediums, video art since its rise to fame in the 1960s has been closely associated with explorations of the self and, more broadly, the nature of identity. At the forefront of the rise of video art was Takahiko Iimura, an artist whose explorations of selfhood delved deeper than many of his contemporaries and successors have.

His first film, On Eye Rape, was a collaboration with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and was essentially an assertion of the Japanese public’s right to see pubic hair. It was 1962, a time of strict censorship in Japan, and the artists ‘rescued’ an American sex ed. film from a bin in Tokyo before splicing pornographic imagery throughout it and punching holes in most of the frames.

Having spent most of the ‘60s in New York mingling and collaborating with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, Iimura went back to Japan in the early ‘70s and has continued his work in many parts of the world. His later films and videos became less focused on social criticism and more involved with abstract ideas of language, spectatorship, time and space. While he has remained radically experimental he was always deeply connected with Zen spirituality and traditional Japanese aesthetics; in two films he looked at the Japanese idea of ‘ma’, a unique concept of space and time, which he explored through the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji.

Below is a video still from his work AIUEONN Six Features (1993), which comprises distorted faces that visually animate the six vowels of the Japanese language. If you want to see the original (assuming such a thing exists in the land of new media art) The Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura No 1 features AIUEONN along with his Filmmakers documentary (a portrait of his favourite avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and of course, himself), as well as several other seminal works.

My how the world would be dull without magnetic fields. No microphones, no rockets, no doorbells, no compasses, no cassettes, no credit cards, no magnet space wheels, no passive aggressive fridge notes between housemates, and no liquid magnetic art from Sachiko Kodama.

After graduating with a degree in physics, Kodama went on to study art, focusing on computer and holography art for her doctorate. She is now associate professor at University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. These pulsating sculptures are the result of her ongoing experiments with ferrofluid, a magnetic liguid that was invented in the late ‘60s by NASA. The mesmerising Morpho Towers: Two Standing Spirals came from a collaborative project with Yasushi Miyajima, who created the musical score the forms are dancing to.

Kodama says that while these works were created with state-of-the art electromagnetic technology, they are inspired by natural phenomena like the ocean, tornados, plant life, sea urchins and rhythms of breath. She imagines that in the future, artificial intelligence may be applied to such materials and techniques as hers, and “if this becomes reality, computers that mimic natural forms may offer a more calm, relaxing and comfortable user experience.”