Koki TANAKA 田中功起

Born:
1975
Residence:
Los Angeles, California, USA
Nationality:
Japanese
Trust:
APT Beijing
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PRESS & PUBLICATIONS

  • Police are investigating a burglary in the latest incident of crime at festival

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  • 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week

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  • The fifth edition of the once-a-decade Münster Sculpture Projects, taking place in the north German town of Münster from June 10 to October 1, has released its participating artists list.

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  • For the 2017 edition of The Armory Show, the fair invited curator Jarrett Gregory to reinvent its Focus section.

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  • Like the weather in early March, in New York, Armory Week is at once thrilling, blustery, exhausting, and it just might make you go numb. There is so much happening, that it’s easy to feel that there’s no way to get a handle on it. By our estimates there are over 650,000 square feet of art fairs alone—that’s like six and a half Manhattan city blocks worth of art—and that doesn’t count the museums, gallery openings or art auctions that you’ve got to make it to. To help you prioritize your to-do list, we have run down some of the essentials of the New York art scene’s spring awakening.

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  • For the exhibition Discordant Harmony, which opens on July 22 at the Taipei National University of the Arts Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, curators Sungjung Kim of Korea, Chien-Hung Huang of Taiwan, Carol Yinghua Lu of China, and Yukie Kamiya of Japan have been invited on behalf of the Goethe Institut to elaborate on concepts previously discussed and jointly proposed in Seoul that will focus on a reexamination and understanding of Asia today through artistic endeavors.

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  • The first few months of 2016 are busy for the art market calendar in Asia, with key contemporary art fairs in Singapore and New Delhi in January, foll

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  • In this video, Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” Koki Tanaka discusses his solo exhibition “Vulnerable Narrator,” at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, and describes the philosophy behind his participatory performance works and his dual role as instigator and observer. The exhibition and catalogue are built of overlapping layers, he explains, as a way of inviting new connections and interpretations from the works he has produced over the last decade.

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  • A multi-colored umbrella slides open. A ladder, kicked, collapses to the ground. Two wire hangers, hooked by the crook, are stretched out of shape. A fluffy white pillow sitting atop a metal table is displaced by an identical fluffy white pillow. A rolled-up, bright green plastic mat is allowed to slowly unfurl. A white dinner plate is furtively flung into a bush. Six rolls of toilet paper are systematically stacked on a balcony railing. A blue doormat is matter-of-factly dropped over a sewer grate. In the video installation Everything is Everything (2006) by Koki Tanaka, seemingly random objects are subjected to seemingly random actions.

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  • Spread out over several museums, art centers, a river delta, and even an old tenement building, the inaugural edition of Parasophia: Kyoto...

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  • There have been a number of correspondences between artist Koki Tanaka and I since our first meeting in 2004 in New York. As he was previously based

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  • Until this year, Vishal Jugdeo's videos were dramatically low-budget affairs. The artist had a crew of two, counting himself and a director

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  • Koki Tanaka had been living in L.A. for just two years when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan on March 11 last year, triggering the devastating

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  • On Saturday 5 July, the Van Abbemuseum opens the first edition of Positions, with contributions by five international artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan,

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  • Visitors to Frieze New York’s VIP preview didn’t seem to know quite how to handle the firefighter holding court near the south end of the tent.

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  • The Frieze Projects program of specially commissioned artworks to be realized at Frieze New York 2014 has been announced. The program for 2014 is curated by Cecilia Alemani and includes seven newly commissioned projects. Frieze New York is located in the unique setting of Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan, overlooking the East River.

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  • Koki Tanaka had been living in L.A. for just two years when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan on March 11 last year, triggering the devastating

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  • Japanese Art from APT Collection at Daiwa Foundation London 

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  • The California-Pacific Triennial, the show features 32 artists from 15 countries that border the Pacific Ocean.

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  • In many ways, the exhibition catalogs of the two biennales that opened in Korea last month served as a telling encapsulation of their respective places in the contemporary art world. The 7th Gwangju Biennale, held under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor, the New York-based curator, put together a thinly condensed guide covering its programs and artists’ descriptions in 110 pages of gloss-coated prints...

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  • Like many other major cities around the world, Kochi, India, has decided to stage an art biennale with the aim of drawing tourist dollars, attracting

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  • Yokohama Triennale 2011, the fourth installment of this large-scale art event, differs from its predecessors in that it is being held primarily

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  • Koki Tanaka, Artist Pension Trust member and participant in the APT organized exhibition "Acting Out of Nothingness" at the Daiwa Foundation Japan House in London, here talks about his project for the Japanese Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale and how he isn't an artist but rather considers himself a coordinator or maker of situations.

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  • Two exciting exhibitions are slated to open in Europe next week, “CAUTION! THINGS MAY APPEAR DIFFERENT THAN THEY ARE” at Nuremberg’s AufAEG, and “Acting out of Nothingness” at the Daiwa Foundation Japan House in London. Although incredibly different exhibitions, each show deals with the concept of individual experience in its own way. But the more common thread uniting the two shows is that the artworks comprising each curatorial vision...

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  • Someone really adept at making intellectual connections might be able to make links between the work of Kim Beom at Artspace and Raymond Ching

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  • Things to see, Places to be across the globe: Dix, Poussin, Rhoades, Hesse, Cage, Klimt, Gupta and many more.

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  • In this charming show at the Box, L.A. artist Koki Tanaka playfully questions assumptions about art’s place and function.

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  • The names just keep coming! The latest country to put forward its representative for the 2013 Venice Biennale is Japan, which announced

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  • This dynamic exhibition of 34 artists offers an expansive view of contemporary practices: from sculptures whose abject aesthetic challenges commodity,

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  • The Japan Foundation have announced that the media artist Koki Tanaka will represent Japan at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The commissioner

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BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1975, Koki Tanaka lives and works in Tokyo and in Los Angeles.

The artist mainly produces video and installation, many of which are developed
site-specifically. He often deals with everyday commodities and surroundings, and recently has put more focus on everyday people’s behavior with his conceptual approach and subtle control, in order to create a visual sphere that challenges the mundane and the rational embedded in the minds of the viewers. In doing so, he lets the work entice them into a spontaneous aesthetic experience.
 
He has shown widely in and outside Japan: at the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo),
Yokohama triennale (Yokohama), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Taipei Biennial
(Taipei), the Asia Society (New York), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San
Francisco), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). 
 
Before graduating from the Tokyo University of Arts, Tanaka was Artist in Residence
at Location One, New York with a support of Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship.
On the recommendation of Kazuhiro Yamamoto, Tanaka was awarded the
Fellowship of Overseas Study Programme for Artists by the Agency for Cultural
Affairs by the Japanese Government.
 
Tanaka was honored by being chosen to represent Japan at the 2013 Venice
Biennale, where he plans to use elements of the March 2011 Tohoku Earthquake
and Tsunami as a theme for the installation.
 
Koki Tanaka is represented by AOYAMA | MEGURO, Tokyo and Vitamin Creative
Space.

For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art