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Masayuki Kawai
11/04

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 Masayuki  Kawai, born in 1972 in Osaka Japan, is a Tokyo-based video-artist and curator.  He received his B.A. in Aesthetics from the University  of Tokyo, and in 1999 founded the Video Art Center Tokyo.  He is an active publisher and critic of contemporary video works. Since 2000, his own video art been shown internationally in Europe, the U.S. and Australia, as well as in the Far East.
 Masayuki Kawai came to the JCVA as both video artist and curator, and stayed in Jerusalem during November of 2004.  Through the JCVA, he was invited to present a selection of Japanese video art works at the Video Zone /2 2004 video festival in Tel Aviv.  His selection, the first showing of Japanese video art in Israel, was accompanied by two lecture presentations, one in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and one in Jerusalem.
A Does Not Equal A, or For Devatas Who Keep On Dancing          

Kawai harnesses video, a medium explicitly linked to our image-dominated consumer-society, to a radical critique of this very society.  Translating the fast-paced life of Tokyo into an overwhelming rush of images, Kawai hypnotizes viewers with an impossible-to-digest flood that mirrors and recreates the effects of post-industrial life. Using various techniques that destroy the narrative and break up the effect of the integrated spectacle common to television, he juxtaposes western philosophical texts with icons of both western and east Asian art. 

Textual references from Hegel, Guy Debord, Sade, Wittgenstein and others meet up with the works of Bernini and the ruined female divinities of the Cambodian temple Angkor Wat.  Especially important to Kawai are the forms painted by two Japanese masters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hasewaga Tohaku.  While almost impossible to see in the nausea-inducing sea of images, they represent precisely what is lost in the speeded-up life where neither space nor time is ever empty – the capacity to contemplate, and the sense of the divine.

A Does Not Equal A, or For Devatas Who Keep On Dancing. Section from video, 2000