21 Mar - 7 Jun, 2015
Arts Maebashi | Gunma, Japan
Introduction
Meiro Koizumi (1976) is one of Japan's most important contemporary artists. His poignant video installations, sculptures and drawings explore themes including nationalism, Japan's wartime history and the fickle nature of memory. THEATERS OF LIFE depicts the past as a mixture of facts, memories and ideas, challenging the viewer to consider history from a new perspective. At the same time, Koizumi also examines how artificial intelligence and biotechnology are impacting our notions of life, individuality and identity. The exhibition paints a touching - and timely - picture of human complexity and vulnerability.
Koizumi's most recent works deal with a younger generation. In the video installation Theater of Life, for instance, he collaborates with young people from the Korean diaspora to depict their own turbulent history. The deeply affecting piece The Angels of Testimony conveys the perspective of youth as well. It features young actors performing an interpretation of a Second Sino-Japanese War veteran's shocking first-hand account. It is as if they are attempting, via a ritual, to come to terms with the nation's collective shame.
The fear of losing one's freedom of choice is a major force behind Koizumi's work. His art asks us to consider the consequences of sacrificing our individuality in service of collective goals or technological advances. The final work in the exhibition, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, exists in a virtual world and offers a hopeful perspective. It invites the viewer to experience a new and optimistic vision of the future.
1. The Altars (sculpture series)
Sculptures, mixed media,
2024-2025
As the extent to which our social lives play out in the digital world increases, our sense of the physical body begins to blur. To explore the current state of our physicality, Koizumi created a series of spatial objects called Altars. In these sculptures, the human and the technological both clash and merge. Body parts dissolve into engine blocks like the products of some Al-generated montage. They dangle helplessly from chains, suspended between the real world and the virtual one in a limbo state that is neither man nor machine. The uncomfortable poses in Altars inspire a sense of unease and revulsion, like something to be avoided. Koizumi has rendered the body's value tangible in a future where technology is increasingly vital.
2. Soluble Meat
single screen video installation, 2025
In Soluble Meat, Koizumi engaged with artificial intelligence as both tool and subject. The work originates from a late 19th-century Japanese book on hypnosis, which introduced into Japan the latest experimental methods then being developed in the West. Koizumi scanned archival black-and-white images of hypnosis sessions and introduced them into an AI program with the prompt: “This is a tragic film about people who are losing their free will.” Each resulting image was then re-fed into the system at regular intervals, producing a chain of uncanny, dreamlike sequences.
The final video oscillates between recognition and disorientation: familiar gestures and bodies dissolve into strange, shifting forms, echoing the trance state of hypnosis while also reflecting the hallucinatory logic of machine-generated imagery. For the voice-over, Koizumi turned to Google’s Gemini AI, allowing the technology to “speak back” to its own visions. Though the process resembles a stream of automated consciousness, Koizumi stresses the human hand that guides each stage.
By linking hypnosis—an early technique for bypassing conscious control—with the generative potential of contemporary AI, Soluble Meat crystallizes Koizumi’s broader artistic concerns: how forces beyond our grasp, whether psychological, political, or technological, infiltrate and reshape the self. The work resonates with surrealist strategies of automatic writing, while also situating them in a present where the unconscious is mediated not only by memory and imagination, but by algorithms.
3. Good Machine Bad Machine
multi-screen video installation,
2024
In Good Machine Bad Machine, Koizumi explores how language influences our thoughts and actions. He was inspired by Good Boy Bad Boy (1985), a video work by American artist Bruce Nauman. In Nauman's piece, two actors repeat the same lines with varying emotions. Koizumi replaces the actors with hypnotised subjects who obey the commands a hypnotist is speaking into their earpieces. Rather than performing emotions, the subjects respond automatically like remote-controlled machines. This underscores the human brain's enduring receptiveness to language - even when it precludes autonomous action.
A second screen displays public life in Tokyo, unfolding in the form of a montage of ordinary street scenes and nationalist demonstrations. With these images, Koizumi raises the question of whether we are truly free or if our actions are subconsciously influenced by our susceptibility to language and commands.
4. Fog (drawing series)
charcoal drawing, 2019 - 2025
The guilt, shame and taboos surrounding Japan's violent wartime past are a recurring theme in Koizumi's work. For his Fog series, he drew new interpretations of scenes from films by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu was a Japanese filmmaker who fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and kept a diary of his time in combat in 1937. At first, Ozu used his diary to record ideas for war films - but then he stopped. It is possible that, as the commander of a unit that deployed gas as a chemical weapon, he could no longer justify the atrocities of the war.
Back home in Japan, Ozu went on to create serene films that depict everyday life in the country. Just below the surface, however, wartime traumas lie hidden. By erasing portions of his drawings, Koizumi draws attention to what is being suppressed. This symbolises the gaps in an emotionally charged and wilfully obscured past.
5. Theater of Life
multi-channel video installation, 2023
When reconstructing the past, facts, memories and imagination all tend to run together. This can be seen in Theater of Life, a video installation for which Koizumi recorded a workshop with young people from the Korean diaspora community in Gwangju, Korea.
These young people had recently settled in Korea but grew up in former Soviet nations such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. As a result, they know very little about their Korean ethnicity and historical heritage. The workshop centred on the history of the Koryo Theater, an important Soviet-Korean theater in Kazakhstan which was founded under Stalin's regime. We see the young people reconstruct theatrical scenes based on old photographs. In the process of this performance, they rediscover their heritage and history. Koizumi uses overlapping transparent images to emphasise that there are multiple perspectives at play, rather than a single truth.
6. Mnemonic (father)
video installation, 2013
Memory and how it works has been a central theme of Koizumi's work from the very beginning. Meiro remembers watching his father draw a B29 - the American bomber that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki - for him from memory. Meiro Koizumi was nine years old at the time. Although his father had experienced the war first-hand as a child, and even though the B29 symbolised destruction, it elicited in young Meiro not only fear but a sense of wonder as well. He liked the aircraft's technological sophistication and its streamlined shape.
For the video work Mnemonic (Father), Koizumi asked his father to draw the bomber again - but this time, on the ceiling. The tiny microphone mounted on the pencil amplifies the scratching sounds as his father draws, conjuring up the menacing sound of falling bombs. The title Mnemonic refers to a mnemonic device: a strategy for retaining information in one's memory.
7. Sleeping Boy
sculpture, 2013
With A Sleeping Boy, Koizumi attempts to gain control of his own fears - specifically, the irrational fear that his newborn son might die. He felt an almost primal instinct to protect his child. To conquer this fear, Koizumi sat by his sleeping son's bedside, night after night. He meticulously recreated the boy's head, hands and feet in clay.
The result was a fragile sculpture of detached body parts in clay and plaster, evoking both tenderness and unease. Through this work, Koizumi has allowed his deep-seated fears to take on tangible form.
8. The Angels of Testimony
multi-channel video installation, 2019
The Angels of Testimony explores the interplay between the individual's sense of guilt and the broader moral burden borne by a society after a war. Hajime Kondo fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). He was among only a handful of veterans to publish a book in which he spoke openly about the war crimes he committed. In an extremely emotional interview, Koizumi confronted Kondo - by then 99 years old - with his own testimony. Although Kondo remembers little and is barely able to speak, the traumas he experienced continue to torment him in dreams.
On large screens, we see young performers repeating his shocking words. They whisper, speak tentatively and scream aloud. It is as if they are conducting a ritual - as if, by embodying these wartime acts, they hope to come to terms with them. Koizumi displays the footage alongside the interview with Kondo, without passing judgement. He emphasises the gap between past and present, as well as the divide between the individual and society. By doing so, he reveals both the complexity of history and the layered nuance of human emotions.
9.Prometheus the Fire-Bringer
VR installation, 2023
When you visit the virtual-reality work Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, you are transported to another world. A child beckons you into a vast forest, where you awake to find yourself transformed. You experience lights, colours and shadows like you have never seen before. Human figures appear and disappear. They seem to bury themselves and then emerge once more, reborn.
This work is the concluding piece of Koizumi's Prometheus trilogy (2019-2023), inspired by the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. For Koizumi, this flame symbolises technology and our desire for progress. Whereas the first two parts of the trilogy depict the tensions between humans and technology, the third part reveals something else entirely. Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, shows us a future in which people undergo a biotech procedure that involves transplanting retinal cells from a butterfly, enabling them to respond more sensitively to their environment. With this 'post-human', Koizumi offers a new and hopeful vision of mankind's future relationship to technology.