Say to Day

Multilingual cross-discipline exploration

Artist: Yutaka Inagawa | Curator: Ying Kwok

Say to Day is an online digital collaboration between Onomichi (Japan) based artist Yutaka Inagawa, and Hong Kong based independent curator Ying Kwok.

Intending to explore the digital architecture of online platforms, they started with Instagram and a new purpose-built website, as testing grounds to better understand and illustrate the architectural characters and limitations of the virtual environment they are dealing with as artist and curator. Whether it is Instagram or website, they all have their own “space”, just like the conditions and layout of a physical space that deserve artistic attention.

The endless possibilities in the digital world allow nonlinear narratives and make ways for illogical approaches. The only limit is our existing knowledge and habitual behaviours, which has been built up over years and accumulated since the day we were in touch with a digital device. The way we swipe the screen for browsing – the sideways, up or downwards movement of our finger – has a natural connection with our eye movements for viewing. Have you ever questioned why we all seem to know clicking on an underlined coloured text will take us to another ‘space’ on the website? While we are exploring our work with these existing knowledge, we are also trying to unlearn, question, and actively seek for alternatives.

This collaboration is also a multi-linguistic experience, focusing on creating inter-cultural dialogues which sometimes is non-communicable. Both artist and curator had been brought up in their own cities – Tokyo and Hong Kong, they had also been living for a long period in the UK, where they met while studying in the university. The decent experience of living and working overseas encouraged them to rethink and look back into their own culture and up-bringing from a distance. 

Inagawa thinks Japanese is good at domesticating everything foreign and make it their own. This can be regarded as a strong uniqueness of Japanese to continuously pursuit their traditions through absorbing nutrition from various sources. However Inagawa has his doubts. By taking this project as an opportunity to re-examine what is foreign and reflect on his experience of a Japanese living abroad, he hopes to find out to what extent foreignness is perceived to be true, and how much is actually filtered, or framed by one’s personal knowledge and experience?

All these are supported by Inagawa’s deep rooted interest in linguistic mistranslations and a polarized notion of what is outside/ inside in Japan. With hindsight, his upbringing and childhood environment in Tokyo was insular and mono-cultural, where domestic and overseas were pigeonholed into twisted snapshots in a carefully curated Japanese way. These mistranslations are obvious in his works, where the text or images he used can take on a literal and also social meaning, that leads to various references and interpretations at personal and cultural levels. 

Say to Day is a project celebrating the transformation and mistranslation across multi-disciplinary platforms and culture. It’s the beginning of a series of exploration through arts.

2020

supported by
Onomichi City University

media sponsor: Glass Magazine

Ying Kwok is a curator

Ying Kwok is an independent curator based in Hong Kong. She works with a diverse range of art and cultural institutions locally and internationally, from artist’s initiatives, art festivals, to public museums and the commercial sector. She always synthesizes different art forms in contemporary visual art, from site specific commissions, performances, to film and video. Kwok is the festival director of Peer to Peer: UK/HK 2020, curator for Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close for Tai Kwun Contemporary and Wellcome Trust, the lead curator of LOOK International Photography Festival 2017, and curator at M+ for Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief as Hong Kong presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale. Before embarking on her independent career, Kwok was the curator at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester UK, between 2006 and 2012. 

Apart from curating, Kwok also founded Art Appraisal Club with a group of local art professionals in 2014, in order to encourage critical thinking and initiating effective art discussions in Hong Kong. The group provides regular exhibition reviews and their articles are published in magazines, various cultural networks and their own bilingual journal, Art Review Hong Kong. In 2014, Kwok was awarded the Asia Cultural Council Fellowship. She is an international fellow in the Clore Leadership Programme 2018/19.

Yutaka Inagawa is an artist

Yutaka Inagawa (b. 1974, Tokyo. Currently lives and works in Onomichi, Japan) received his MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Arts in 2004, and his BA in Painting from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1997.

Inagawa’s work presents the viewer with ambiguous, shapeshifting modules that inhabit a hyper-digital world. Physical and digital manipulations co-exist as a core element of his practice. 

The artist’s mirage-like creations are made from changeable materials that coalesce to create a semi-organic mass on the edge of entropy.

Materials are repurposed and approached anew; ideas on the periphery of the artist’s intentions are brought to the fore and alternative end points are realized. Examples of socio-cultural malfunctions and their ramifications are used as catalysts for a contemporary sublime. 

Inagawa is a founding director of ONLY CONNECT (2015-present) and Floating Urban Slime/Sublime (2017-present); both are mini-labs that use experimentation as a driving force for international art projects. Selected exhibitions and projects: Another Pair of Eyes (artist-curator), Duddell’s, Hong Kong (2019-2020), “ONLY CONNECT OSAKA (artist-curator), Creative Center Osaka, Osaka (2019); I Say Yesterday, You Hear Tomorrow: Visions from Japan (group show), Gallerie delle Prigioni, Treviso, Italy (2018); collaboration with Glass magazine on the belief issue (2015); and Sensory Cocktails (solo show), Gallery Zandari, Seoul (2009).

He is also an Associate Professor in the Art and Design Department at Onomichi City University.

www.yutakainagawa.net