Meiro Koizumi investigates the boundaries between the private and the public, a domain of specific importance to his native Japanese culture. His videos are often based on performances and constructed scenarios. He places characters, played by himself or others, in awkward situations. Often starting harmoniously he gradually heightens the tension manipulating the situation from humorous to painful. His performances focus and enlarge the moment when a situation gets out of control, becomes embarrassing or breaks social rules. His works also include drawings and collages.
Artworks
Articles
Media
Highlights
Recommendations
Collections
Shows
Market position
CV
Artworks by Meiro Koizumi
Articles on Meiro Koizumi
Media
Meiro Koizumi is interviewed on occasion of his participation to the groupshow "JAPAN. BODY_PERFORM_LIVE
Resistance and Resilience in Japanese Contemporary Art" at PAC in Milan 22.11 - 12.02.2023
On view his video work: "We Mourn the Dead of the Future".
About
One Screen, Two Points of View
It would be hard to find another work of contemporary art that protests war with such soulful grace and understated wit as Meiro Koizumi’s “Defect in Vision” (2011), the main attraction of a small show at the Museum of Modern Art. Projected in somewhat different versions on opposite sides of a single screen in lustrous black and white, Mr. Koizumi’s 12-minute video meditates on the doomed, myth-saturated mind of Japan’s warrior class in the last days of World War II.
A man and his wife sit on the floor and dine at a low table in a small, old-world-style room. Setting aside a newspaper he has been perusing, the husband reports that a full-scale offensive against the Americans in Okinawa is soon to begin.
“Will kamikaze blow again?” the wife inquires. (Kamikaze translates as “divine wind.”)
“It’s time to show off some ‘samurai spirit,’ ” her husband boasts. Evidently he will be joining the attack, and he promises that on his return he will accompany her on a holiday trip to a place where they will bathe in hots springs, take long walks and have sake for lunch. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” the wife wistfully observes, “you are happy as long as you drink sake.”
As they fumble with the food and drink on the table, you realize early on that both characters are blind, as are the actors themselves. The symbolism is glaringly obvious but poignant nevertheless, as their blindness allegorizes a deep-seated obliviousness to historical reality.
As played out in Mr. Koizumi’s video, the dialogue takes only a couple of minutes, but it repeats several times with variations of camera work — changes of focus, points of view and so on — happening on both sides of the screen. At one point in the film, production assistants enter the room and move things around while the conversation is going on, lending it all an oddly artificial feeling. Yet, with each repetition, the meaning and its attendant feelings deepen.
At the end comes a hyperbolic climax: on one side of the screen we see a close-up of the man in a pilot’s hat and goggles, evidently flying an open-cockpit plane and crying out over the roar of wind and engine noise, “Chieko, I am sorry” and “Chieko, goodbye.”
On the other side, the wife remains tearfully at the dining table. “It doesn’t matter where you are, you are happy as long as you drink sake,” she repeats, and she pleads as she has in previous iterations, “Please come back alive.”
I can only imagine how this work must strike Japanese viewers. Mr. Koizumi, who lives in Yokohama, is just 36, but it feels as if he were tapping into a deep, multigenerational river of mourning. A museum wall text points out the relevance of the nuclear debacle in Fukushima, which happened in 2011 while Mr. Koizumi was making “Defect in Vision.”
Yet for this American, at least, the tragic bravado it projects is all too easy to relate to in light of wars the United States has engaged in, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Suicidal blindness of this kind knows no national boundaries.
Organized by Sarah Suzuki, an associate curator of prints and illustrated books at MoMA, the exhibition includes two earlier videos by Mr. Koizumi that are showing on flat screens. These, too, deal with grief but are leavened by humor in wonderfully imaginative ways.
In “Human Opera” (2007), a video artist invites a man into a surrealistically funky studio to recount a tragic story from the man’s life. As the guest talks, the artist subjects him, with an almost sadistic busyness, to various irritating and humiliating adjustments to his clothing and body meant to make the video more visually interesting. The final scene, a kind of shamanistic exorcism, is shocking, scary and hilarious.
“My Voice Would Reach You” (2009) is a quieter, more plaintive piece, in which a young man tries to communicate by cellphone and letter with his deceased beloved mother. There is an element of absurdist comedy, but as in Mr. Koizumi’s other two works, surface cleverness floats on genuine depths of emotion.
The New York Times
Meiro Koizumi: Battlelands
In military parlance, ‘situational awareness’ refers to taking cognisance of one’s surroundings with an aim to identify potential threats. Soldiers are taught to survey any visible bodies – what are hands doing, where are eyes gazing, what garments are figures wearing? The surrounding space is also of concern, to be inventoried for blind spots, entrance points and spaces to take cover. First learned in training, in combat these habits ingrain themselves in the body instinctually. After returning home from duty, many soldiers involuntarily persist in this incessant scanning, a vestigial hypervigilance that is a common symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Scanning is a glaringly recurring action in Meiro Koizumi’s video Battlelands, 2018, which was the focus of this solo exhibition at White Rainbow. ‘Scanning, scanning, scanning ... Not sure what’s happening ... Just don’t want to die,’ recalls one man in the video. He is one of the work’s five participants, all US combat veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Koizumi asked the veterans to wear body cameras and walk through their homes and neighbourhoods, capturing footage of their civilian lives across Miami, San Francisco, San Diego and Oakland. During these perambulations, the participants alternate between describing their immediate surroundings and narrating memories from war. One woman pans the camera across her rigorously tidy kitchen counter and pauses the shot on a white stove. ‘This is where I cook,’ she explains, but suddenly, while the shot lingers in the kitchen, she begins recounting, ‘I can hear the sergeants yelling, “GET OUT OF THE TRUCK, GET OUT OF THE TRUCK!” I can feel the heat. The smoke.’
Such bodycam footage of domestic scenes makes up the entire hour-long work. In the context of military pursuits, the bodycam recalls distressing imagery. Infamously, the White House is believed to have streamed live bodycam footage of the Navy SEAL raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011; that same year, a helmet-mounted camera recorded a British soldier in Afghanistan turning his pistol on a wounded Taliban fighter and firing a fatal shot. Koizumi’s comparably prosaic scenes are clearly meant to undermine these associations. Yet in the work’s suburban terrain of kitchen appliances and palm tree-lined sidewalks, there broods a sustained unease. Partly, it arises from the technical quality of the camera, with its wide-angle lens that forces the rectilinear to curve, and its predisposition to both over- and underexpose, bearing images of a stark, grainy world. This atmospheric anxiety is amplified by a droning soundtrack that accompanies much of the video. Yet this addition feels unnecessary, for what the narrated footage, with its intruding memories, affirms is that trauma possesses the everyday of those who have experienced war, that for them it is the noise of quotidian life – the rumbling of a truck engine, the chattering of crowds – that menaces.
With its profound emphasis on the psychological dimension of partaking in war’s violence, Battlelands finds continuity with Koizumi’s earlier work concerning Japan’s military history. His ‘Double Projection’ video works from 2013 and 2014 similarly explore a war figure, the Second World War Kamikazi pilot, through the to-camera recollection of survivors. However, Battlelands departs from his earlier work not only in engaging non-Japanese civilians – notably a first for the artist – but also in excising the narrators’ faces. The late Harun Farocki (Interview podcast on AM’s website), after trawling through troves of war scenes in mainstream films for his work War Tropes, 2011, had recognised the centrality of the face as trauma’s site of signification: ‘There is no war movie’, he noted, ‘in which the horrors of war did not appear in a moment of epiphany on the faces of the characters: freezing in action, eyes wide open, not wanting to see, but cannot stop looking.’ With its first-person point of view, Battlelands inverts this tradition; in so doing, it shifts emphasis from representation to phenomenology in order to pose the question: how does trauma reorient the body to the world?
Also included in the exhibition in a sombrely lit adjacent room was a sculpture from 2015 titled Sleeping Boy. It comprised numerous copies of diminutive arms, legs and heads, formed of clay and plaster in the likeness of the artist’s young son, which were arranged into a cluster on the ground. Heads lay adjacent to legs and feet, demolishing symbolic hierarchy in emphasis of materiality. Deeply personal, this work reflects a facet of the artist’s practice very different to Battleland’s collaborative and social production. Here, the repeating sculptural forms evoke compulsion and preoccupation, and equally routine and dedication, plumbing the artist’s own paternal anxieties about the fragile mutability of the human body, a counterpoint to the video’s psychological portraits of a generation altered by foreign wars.
Art Monthly
Meiro Koizumi
For his fifth solo exhibition at Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam, Meiro Koizumi continued the trajectory of his previous work, forcing viewers to reckon with their own personal value systems by setting individual ethics against the moral codes of the state and/or our collective culture(s). At the entrance to the show, the charcoal drawing Fog #3, 2019, greeted visitors with its unsettling depiction of a woman beaming serenely outward while holding something smoldering in her bare hands. On an adjacent wall was House, 2019, a trio of small frames, each containing nearly identical typed accounts of a Japanese soldier tasked with committing horrific acts while fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. While all three shared the same title, “A House,” each tale had a slightly different ending, though none left very much room for hope. The stage was set.
The rest of the gallery was [...]
— Huib Haye van der Werf
Artforum
Meiro Koizumi
Last summer, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe controversially revised the pacifist Japanese constitution to allow Japanese forces to fight abroad for the first time since World War II. The decision picked a fragile scab, exposing the unhealed wound in Japanese collective memory – a wound that artist Meiro Koizumi has been examining in his work over the past several years. When remembering the war, how does one separate memory from nostalgia, propaganda and revisionism? How can we relate to others’ painful memories of war, and how can artists represent these stories, particularly when they fall on the ears of those unwilling to listen?
‘Theory on the Desk’, Koizumi’s first solo exhibition in France, is a product of his residency at Kadist Art Foundation, where he researched and produced two new videos that confront the trauma of WWII as it has been filtered and reinterpreted through the intervening years. The Confessions (2014), is based on an interview the artist conducted with a Japanese man that he contacted in Paris, who had joined the French Foreign Legion in the hope of experiencing battle. Koizumi creates a condensed war story, splicing the interview into a short one-and-a-half-minute account. The footage stays closely cropped to the interviewee’s mouth as he relates a dramatic tale of being ‘on the front line [...] in Afghanistan’ where ‘bullets were flying all around’, which comes in short bursts of speech. The narrative logically coheres, but it is also dubious, as Koizumi makes no attempt to hide the fact that he has spliced and edited the legionnaire’s testimony. We don’t realize how much he has manipulated the story, however, until we turn to the interview transcript presented on a wooden stand in front of the monitor. Here, a totally new narrative unfolds: the ‘bullets flying around’ turn out to be part of the legionnaire’s description of a scene in the movie Black Hawk Down (2001). Reading further, we learn that he never saw the front line, and ended up deserting the Legion. Koizumi’s video illustrates how war stories, contemporary and historical, come to us filtered through untold layers of interpretation. Neither video nor transcript proves to be reliable evidence of what happened (or didn’t) in battle.
The second video, Trapped Words (2014), features another close-up of a man’s face – this time wrinkled and worn, barely lit against a black background. This is Mr. Harada, a WWII survivor, narrating his memory of the American bombing of his city, Maebashi, when he was eight. He closes his eyes, as if trying to picture the attack, and recounts a claustrophobic tale of fighting his way into a crowded air-raid shelter with his parents and, once inside, fearing that he would burn to death. Harada calls up each detail slowly, reciting the dialogue he remembers and imitating the noises of sirens and bombs falling. It’s as if he’s narrating a film clip playing in his head – trying to give us the most direct access to his memory, but one nonetheless filtered through time passed, unreliable recollection, the limits of speech and the artist’s representation. ‘Help me please’, he repeats, summoning the voice of his long-lost eight-year-old self. Eventually, we begin to visualize the shelter and imagine the heat: but it is our memory, our vision, far removed from Harada’s first-hand experience. An excerpt from a historical text, which Koizumi includes in the exhibition booklet, fills in the missing, tragic details of the bombing: ‘People who were in the shelter were asphyxiated by smoke and heat […] Only a few people were resuscitated thanks to mouth-to-mouth, the others having died instantly.’
Discounting Koizumi’s sculptures – clay limbs cast from the body of the artist’s young son and assembled in parts – which felt superfluous and clumsy compared to the videos, the artist’s mannered interviews of survivors and supplementary texts are an effective counter-strategy to our inoculation against pictures and documents of war. In his work, words that should act as proof are the very things that cast doubt on any real account of war or history. But, in asking witnesses to reenact or recount dramatic events, Koizumi is committed not only to how important the retelling is – but also how crucial it is for us to listen.
Frieze
Shows
In museum collection:
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
Museum Voorlinden
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Frans Hals Museum
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Tate Modern, London
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris
Museum M+ Hong Kong
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Centraal Museum Utrecht
Mori Art Museum
Museum De Pont
Market position
Meiro Koizumi attended the International Christian University, Tokyo; Chelsea College of Art and Design, London as well as the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Annet Gelink Gallery (2017), De Hallen, Haarlem (2016), Arts Maebashi, Maebashi (2015), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2014), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos (2012), Art Space, Sydney (2011) and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009). He participated in numerous group shows such as the Experimenta's 5th International Biennial of Media Art, Melbourne (2014), 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Shenzen (2014), Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2014), MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul (2013), Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2012), Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011), Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2010), Media City, Seoul (2010), Shanghai MOCA, Shanghai (2008) and many other.
His works are included in a.o. the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
His works are included in a.o. the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
CV
Meiro Koizumi
1976 Born in Gunma, JP; Lives and works in Yokohama, JP
Education
2005 - 2006 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL
1999 - 2002 Chelsea College of Art and Design, London Institute - BA Fine Art, London, UK
1996 - 1999 International Christian University – BA Liberal Arts, Tokyo, JP
Solo Exhibitions
2019 FOG, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Battlelands, Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art, Minneapolis
2018 Battlelands, Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA
2016 Air, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo, Japan
Today My Empire Sings, De Hallen, Haarlem NL
In Between the night and sleepwalkers, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
2015 Arts Maebashi, Maebashi, JP
Portrait of a Failed Silence, MUAC - Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, MexicoCity
Trapped Voice Would Dream of Silence, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, JP
2014 Testsite, Austin, Texas, USA Theory on the Desk, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, FR
Double Projection, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
2013 BMW Tate live: Performance Room, Tate Modern, London
Art Projections, Annet Gellink Gallery, Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL
Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
2012 Defect in Vision, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos, ES Human Opera, San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, VN
2011 Broken Heroes, Beautiful Afternoons, Artspace, Sydney, AU My voice would reach you, LOOP ART FAIR, Barcelona, ES
2010 Total Ecstasy, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Alon Levin presents Art Shows: Meiro Koizumi, KLEMM’s projectroom 7d5e, Berlin, DE
The Love Supreme, Gallery Raku, Kyoto Zokei University, Kyoto, JP
2009 The Corner of Sweet and Bitter, Open Satellite, Bellevue WA, US
My Voice would Reach You- A Survey of the First Ten Years, 2000-2009, Hedreen Gallery, Seattle, WA, US
MAM Project 009, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP
2008 Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, US 2007 XXX: Trilogy, Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
2006 Portrait of M., Zinger presents, Tilburg, NL
Annet Gelink Gallery, The Bakery, Amsterdam, NL 2005 Mary Mary, Glasgow, UK
Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo, BR
Jap, Window Gallery, Antwerp, BE 2004 Powerlessly Hardcore, The Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
Group Exhibitions
2020 Measure Your Existence, The Rubin Museum of Art, NYC
2019 Aichi Triennale, Aichi, JP (forthcoming)
Hidden History, Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, NL
Honolulu Biennale, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Sharjah Biennial - Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah, UAE
2018 Visions of Exchange, Mercedes-Benz Art Scope Award 2009-2017, Daimler Contemporary, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin
Art Basel, with Annet Gelink Gallery, Basel, CH
10th Asia Art Biennial, Taiwan Museum of Art, Taiwan
2017 Faits alternatifs, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, FR
2016 Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon - Part 2, Manifesta Office, Amsterdam, NL
Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon - Part 1, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
The Time is Out of Joint , Sharjah Biennial, (United Arab Emirates)
Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection ―From Shōhaku and Rosanjin to Anselm
Kiefer― Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan
2015 Trans-Northeast Asia, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia
Manual to the Reality, DigiArt Gallery, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei
Stance or Distance?, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto, Japan
inToAsia: TBA Festival 2015 (screening), Queens Museum, New York
Don’t Follow the Wind, Non-Visitor Center, Exclusion Zone of the nuclear disaster site, Fukushima, Japan
Demarcation – Akira Takayama + Meiro Koizumi, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo
Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed, Genia Schreiber University Gallery, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv
La chose/The Thing, Centre d'Art Contemporarian la Synagogue de Delme, France
Chercher le garcon, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL), France
The Subtle Triangle, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Invisible Energy, ST Paul St Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
2014 Amsterdam Drawing Extended, Annet Gelink, Gallery, Amsterdam, NL Emoties, Gemeentemuseum Helmond,
Helmond, NL
Ten MIllion Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong, Para Site, Hong Kong, CN
Shenzhen Biennale, Shenzhen, CN Wehaveneverparticipated,8th
ShenzhenSculptureBiennale,Shenzhen,CN Affekte (Affects), Kunstpalais in Erlangen,
Erlangen, DE Will happiness find me?”, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, JP
2013 Kazeiro no Hana (Dialogue with Future), Arts Maebashi, Gunma Unknown Forces,
MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul, TR
KAdE, Now Japan, Amersfoort, NL
If you will it, it is not a dream, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
Roppongi Crossing, Mori Museum, Tokyo
Shame, Fundacion Especial Caja Madrid, Madrid
ArtBO International Art Fair Bogota, CO Agenda Santiago, En El Cab – CAB Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Burgos
Move on Asia, Towards a New Art Network
2004-2013 City Gallery Wellington, NZ Move on Asia, video art in Asia
2002-2012, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
Out of Doubt, Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP
Nissan Art Award, Yokohama, JP
Future Generation Art Prize, Venice, IT
Unattained Landscapes, The Japan Foundation, Venice, IT
2012 15th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh 2012, Dhaka
Her name is Abstra, Daido Warehouse, Kyoto
Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize
2012 PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, UA
9th Shanghai Biennale, Bandung Pavillion, collaborative work with Duto Hardono
Identity VIII, Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, JP
Experimenta Speak to Me, 5th Biennale of Media Art : Melbourne, AU
Project Liquido, Fundacion Alumnos 47, Mexico City
Emotional Blackmail, Kitchener – Waterloo Art Gallery, Canada
Journey to the West, Japan Foundation in Lalit Kalat Academy, New Delhi, IN
Tokyo Story, Tokyo Wondersite, Tokyo, JP
2011 Impersonale, Miro Foundation in Mallorca, Spain (Performance)
OK Video, 5th Jakarta International Video Festival, Jakarta, ID
After Humanism, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, KR
Emotional Blackmail, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, CA
Art Scope 2009-2011: Invisible Memories, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo JP
Super 8, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, US
Silent Narrator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, JP
Unknown Sight, Maebashi Museum Pre-event, Gunma, JP
2010 Liverpool Biennial 2010, FACT, Liverpool, UK
Media City Seoul 2010, The 6th Seoul International Biennale of Media Art, Seoul, KR
Yellow Gate, Sangrok Gallery of Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju, KR
Last Words 2, 4A Center for Asian Contemporary Art, Sydney, AU
Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, JP
Resonance, Suntory Museum, Osaka, JP
2009 A Blow to Everyday, Osage Gallery, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Hong Kong, CN
Japan Video Window, Galerija Duplex, Sarajevo, BA
Bivouac, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia, US
Re : Membering – Next of Japan, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, KR
2008 3rd Nanjing Triennal, Nanjing, CN Artificial Nature, Shanghai MOCA, Shanghai CN
Life Stories, Gallery TPW, Toronto, CA
Brotherhood of Subterranea, Kunstbunker, Nuremberg, DE
Rehab ! Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal with Christina Jankowski and Meiro Koizumi, Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Amsterdam, NL
Persona Non Grata, One in the Other, London, UK
2007 Tussle in Shorthand, Punch Gallery, Seattle, US
It Is Not A Question Of Knowing Whether This Interests You But Rather Whether You
Yourself Coul Become More Interesting Under New Conditions Of Cultural Creation, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, US
De ontdekking van de traagheid, KW 14, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, NL
2006 War and Nature, Virgile de Voldere Gallery, New York, US Work, Kunstfort, Vijfhuizen, NL
Sexy Politics, Alpha M Project 2005 / vol 8, Art Space Kimura ASK, Tokyo, JP
Hiscox Art Award, Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam, NL
2005 Hotspots, Essl Collection, Vienna, AU
videoDictionary, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, ES
Relocated Identities/ Part I – Overexposure, Public Space with a Roof, Amsterdam, NL
2004 No Pre / No Con, Galeria Moriarty, Madrid, ES
Mediarena, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, NZ
Old Habits Die Hard, Norwich Gallery (UK), Kunstnernes Hus, NO
Out the Window, Japan Foundation Forum (Tokyo), Project Space Zip, Seoul, KR
2003 Group VS Show, The Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
Please Don't Make Me Cry, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London, UK
2001 Beck's Futures 2 - Student Film and Video Award, ICA (London, UK),
Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool, UK),
Sotheby's (New York, US)
I Goo Goo, Hothaus , London, UK
Selected video screenings and events
2017 IDFA - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL
2014 Meiro Koizumi: Human Opera xxx VideoGud, Videokonstnätverket , April 24 – May 14
Gävlebor, Uppsala. Dalarna, SE
Meiro Koizumi: FUSEBOX, April 16 - April 27, Austin Texas, USA
Meiro Koizumi on the Fine Line between Humor and Cruelty, April 22, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
2013 Meiro Koizumi: TATE LIVE, June 13
2012 Screening and talk, Goethe Institut Hanoi, February 17, VN
2011 Performance Autopsychobabble # 2, Impersonate, Fundacio Pilar I Joan Miro a Mallorca, Mallorca, ES
Performance Autopsychobabble, Art Basel 42, June 17th, Basel, CH
Panorama, Impakt Festival 2011, Utrecht, NL
2008 Asian Hot Shots Berlin, Festival for Film and Video Art, Berlin, DE
To-Lo Video Screening: Recent Video Art from Japan, The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London, UK
2007 Idiot Joy Showland, The IFC Centre, New York, US
Video Art Screening Vol. 5 – After the News, BankART1929, Yokohama, JP
Art Summer University, Tate Modern, London, UK
Japanese Video Art Screening, Heine Onstad Kunstsenter, NO
2006 Galleries Show, Extra City, Antwerp, BE
2005 Video Art Screening Tokyo Vol. 4 - Dreaming bodies, Asahi Art Squre, Tokyo, JP
Panorama, Impakt Festival 2005, Utrecht, NL
2004 All Tomorrow's Déjà Vu, Island Art Film and Video Festival 04 (London),
Video Mundi, at Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, US
MoveonAsia,SBS1st FloorAtrium,Seoul,KR Video Art Screening Tokyo Vol. 3 - Paradise
Views, Tokyo International Forum Hall D1, Tokyo, JP
2003 In Different Spaces, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, JP
Blowing up Film and Video Festival, The Clerkenwell, London, UK
2002 Not Adressed, Pump House Gallery, London, UK
SCRAMBLE, Brunei Gallery, University of London/Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
Awards, grants and residencies
2018 Residency at MAC VAL, Paris
2014 Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. FR
2013 Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center – People's Prize
2012 Residency San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, VN
2010 Art Scope
2009/2010 Daimler Foundation in Japan (DFJ), Berlin, DE
2009 Open Satellite, Bellevue WA, US
2005 Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists, Agency for Cultural Affairs,Jp
2003 Arcus Project, Ibaraki, JP
2001 Beck’s Futures 2 – Student Film and Video Award, 1st prize, London, UK
Collections
M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Tate Modern, London, UK
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, NL
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL
Museum De Hallen, Haarlem, NL
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, FR
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, JP
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, AU
FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angouleme, FR
Takashi Murakami, Tokyo, JP
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, NL
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, NL
Caldic Collection, Wassenaar, NL
1976 Born in Gunma, JP; Lives and works in Yokohama, JP
Education
2005 - 2006 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL
1999 - 2002 Chelsea College of Art and Design, London Institute - BA Fine Art, London, UK
1996 - 1999 International Christian University – BA Liberal Arts, Tokyo, JP
Solo Exhibitions
2019 FOG, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Battlelands, Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art, Minneapolis
2018 Battlelands, Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA
2016 Air, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo, Japan
Today My Empire Sings, De Hallen, Haarlem NL
In Between the night and sleepwalkers, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
2015 Arts Maebashi, Maebashi, JP
Portrait of a Failed Silence, MUAC - Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, MexicoCity
Trapped Voice Would Dream of Silence, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, JP
2014 Testsite, Austin, Texas, USA Theory on the Desk, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, FR
Double Projection, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
2013 BMW Tate live: Performance Room, Tate Modern, London
Art Projections, Annet Gellink Gallery, Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL
Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
2012 Defect in Vision, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos, ES Human Opera, San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, VN
2011 Broken Heroes, Beautiful Afternoons, Artspace, Sydney, AU My voice would reach you, LOOP ART FAIR, Barcelona, ES
2010 Total Ecstasy, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
Alon Levin presents Art Shows: Meiro Koizumi, KLEMM’s projectroom 7d5e, Berlin, DE
The Love Supreme, Gallery Raku, Kyoto Zokei University, Kyoto, JP
2009 The Corner of Sweet and Bitter, Open Satellite, Bellevue WA, US
My Voice would Reach You- A Survey of the First Ten Years, 2000-2009, Hedreen Gallery, Seattle, WA, US
MAM Project 009, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP
2008 Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, US 2007 XXX: Trilogy, Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
2006 Portrait of M., Zinger presents, Tilburg, NL
Annet Gelink Gallery, The Bakery, Amsterdam, NL 2005 Mary Mary, Glasgow, UK
Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo, BR
Jap, Window Gallery, Antwerp, BE 2004 Powerlessly Hardcore, The Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
Group Exhibitions
2020 Measure Your Existence, The Rubin Museum of Art, NYC
2019 Aichi Triennale, Aichi, JP (forthcoming)
Hidden History, Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, NL
Honolulu Biennale, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Sharjah Biennial - Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah, UAE
2018 Visions of Exchange, Mercedes-Benz Art Scope Award 2009-2017, Daimler Contemporary, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin
Art Basel, with Annet Gelink Gallery, Basel, CH
10th Asia Art Biennial, Taiwan Museum of Art, Taiwan
2017 Faits alternatifs, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, FR
2016 Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon - Part 2, Manifesta Office, Amsterdam, NL
Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon - Part 1, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
The Time is Out of Joint , Sharjah Biennial, (United Arab Emirates)
Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection ―From Shōhaku and Rosanjin to Anselm
Kiefer― Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan
2015 Trans-Northeast Asia, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia
Manual to the Reality, DigiArt Gallery, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei
Stance or Distance?, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto, Japan
inToAsia: TBA Festival 2015 (screening), Queens Museum, New York
Don’t Follow the Wind, Non-Visitor Center, Exclusion Zone of the nuclear disaster site, Fukushima, Japan
Demarcation – Akira Takayama + Meiro Koizumi, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo
Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed, Genia Schreiber University Gallery, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv
La chose/The Thing, Centre d'Art Contemporarian la Synagogue de Delme, France
Chercher le garcon, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL), France
The Subtle Triangle, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Invisible Energy, ST Paul St Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
2014 Amsterdam Drawing Extended, Annet Gelink, Gallery, Amsterdam, NL Emoties, Gemeentemuseum Helmond,
Helmond, NL
Ten MIllion Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong, Para Site, Hong Kong, CN
Shenzhen Biennale, Shenzhen, CN Wehaveneverparticipated,8th
ShenzhenSculptureBiennale,Shenzhen,CN Affekte (Affects), Kunstpalais in Erlangen,
Erlangen, DE Will happiness find me?”, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, JP
2013 Kazeiro no Hana (Dialogue with Future), Arts Maebashi, Gunma Unknown Forces,
MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul, TR
KAdE, Now Japan, Amersfoort, NL
If you will it, it is not a dream, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
Roppongi Crossing, Mori Museum, Tokyo
Shame, Fundacion Especial Caja Madrid, Madrid
ArtBO International Art Fair Bogota, CO Agenda Santiago, En El Cab – CAB Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Burgos
Move on Asia, Towards a New Art Network
2004-2013 City Gallery Wellington, NZ Move on Asia, video art in Asia
2002-2012, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
Out of Doubt, Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP
Nissan Art Award, Yokohama, JP
Future Generation Art Prize, Venice, IT
Unattained Landscapes, The Japan Foundation, Venice, IT
2012 15th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh 2012, Dhaka
Her name is Abstra, Daido Warehouse, Kyoto
Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize
2012 PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, UA
9th Shanghai Biennale, Bandung Pavillion, collaborative work with Duto Hardono
Identity VIII, Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, JP
Experimenta Speak to Me, 5th Biennale of Media Art : Melbourne, AU
Project Liquido, Fundacion Alumnos 47, Mexico City
Emotional Blackmail, Kitchener – Waterloo Art Gallery, Canada
Journey to the West, Japan Foundation in Lalit Kalat Academy, New Delhi, IN
Tokyo Story, Tokyo Wondersite, Tokyo, JP
2011 Impersonale, Miro Foundation in Mallorca, Spain (Performance)
OK Video, 5th Jakarta International Video Festival, Jakarta, ID
After Humanism, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, KR
Emotional Blackmail, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, CA
Art Scope 2009-2011: Invisible Memories, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo JP
Super 8, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, US
Silent Narrator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, JP
Unknown Sight, Maebashi Museum Pre-event, Gunma, JP
2010 Liverpool Biennial 2010, FACT, Liverpool, UK
Media City Seoul 2010, The 6th Seoul International Biennale of Media Art, Seoul, KR
Yellow Gate, Sangrok Gallery of Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju, KR
Last Words 2, 4A Center for Asian Contemporary Art, Sydney, AU
Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, JP
Resonance, Suntory Museum, Osaka, JP
2009 A Blow to Everyday, Osage Gallery, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Hong Kong, CN
Japan Video Window, Galerija Duplex, Sarajevo, BA
Bivouac, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia, US
Re : Membering – Next of Japan, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, KR
2008 3rd Nanjing Triennal, Nanjing, CN Artificial Nature, Shanghai MOCA, Shanghai CN
Life Stories, Gallery TPW, Toronto, CA
Brotherhood of Subterranea, Kunstbunker, Nuremberg, DE
Rehab ! Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal with Christina Jankowski and Meiro Koizumi, Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Amsterdam, NL
Persona Non Grata, One in the Other, London, UK
2007 Tussle in Shorthand, Punch Gallery, Seattle, US
It Is Not A Question Of Knowing Whether This Interests You But Rather Whether You
Yourself Coul Become More Interesting Under New Conditions Of Cultural Creation, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, US
De ontdekking van de traagheid, KW 14, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, NL
2006 War and Nature, Virgile de Voldere Gallery, New York, US Work, Kunstfort, Vijfhuizen, NL
Sexy Politics, Alpha M Project 2005 / vol 8, Art Space Kimura ASK, Tokyo, JP
Hiscox Art Award, Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam, NL
2005 Hotspots, Essl Collection, Vienna, AU
videoDictionary, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, ES
Relocated Identities/ Part I – Overexposure, Public Space with a Roof, Amsterdam, NL
2004 No Pre / No Con, Galeria Moriarty, Madrid, ES
Mediarena, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, NZ
Old Habits Die Hard, Norwich Gallery (UK), Kunstnernes Hus, NO
Out the Window, Japan Foundation Forum (Tokyo), Project Space Zip, Seoul, KR
2003 Group VS Show, The Dicksmith Gallery, London, UK
Please Don't Make Me Cry, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London, UK
2001 Beck's Futures 2 - Student Film and Video Award, ICA (London, UK),
Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool, UK),
Sotheby's (New York, US)
I Goo Goo, Hothaus , London, UK
Selected video screenings and events
2017 IDFA - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL
2014 Meiro Koizumi: Human Opera xxx VideoGud, Videokonstnätverket , April 24 – May 14
Gävlebor, Uppsala. Dalarna, SE
Meiro Koizumi: FUSEBOX, April 16 - April 27, Austin Texas, USA
Meiro Koizumi on the Fine Line between Humor and Cruelty, April 22, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
2013 Meiro Koizumi: TATE LIVE, June 13
2012 Screening and talk, Goethe Institut Hanoi, February 17, VN
2011 Performance Autopsychobabble # 2, Impersonate, Fundacio Pilar I Joan Miro a Mallorca, Mallorca, ES
Performance Autopsychobabble, Art Basel 42, June 17th, Basel, CH
Panorama, Impakt Festival 2011, Utrecht, NL
2008 Asian Hot Shots Berlin, Festival for Film and Video Art, Berlin, DE
To-Lo Video Screening: Recent Video Art from Japan, The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London, UK
2007 Idiot Joy Showland, The IFC Centre, New York, US
Video Art Screening Vol. 5 – After the News, BankART1929, Yokohama, JP
Art Summer University, Tate Modern, London, UK
Japanese Video Art Screening, Heine Onstad Kunstsenter, NO
2006 Galleries Show, Extra City, Antwerp, BE
2005 Video Art Screening Tokyo Vol. 4 - Dreaming bodies, Asahi Art Squre, Tokyo, JP
Panorama, Impakt Festival 2005, Utrecht, NL
2004 All Tomorrow's Déjà Vu, Island Art Film and Video Festival 04 (London),
Video Mundi, at Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, US
MoveonAsia,SBS1st FloorAtrium,Seoul,KR Video Art Screening Tokyo Vol. 3 - Paradise
Views, Tokyo International Forum Hall D1, Tokyo, JP
2003 In Different Spaces, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, JP
Blowing up Film and Video Festival, The Clerkenwell, London, UK
2002 Not Adressed, Pump House Gallery, London, UK
SCRAMBLE, Brunei Gallery, University of London/Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
Awards, grants and residencies
2018 Residency at MAC VAL, Paris
2014 Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. FR
2013 Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center – People's Prize
2012 Residency San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, VN
2010 Art Scope
2009/2010 Daimler Foundation in Japan (DFJ), Berlin, DE
2009 Open Satellite, Bellevue WA, US
2005 Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists, Agency for Cultural Affairs,Jp
2003 Arcus Project, Ibaraki, JP
2001 Beck’s Futures 2 – Student Film and Video Award, 1st prize, London, UK
Collections
M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Tate Modern, London, UK
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, NL
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL
Museum De Hallen, Haarlem, NL
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, FR
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, JP
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, AU
FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angouleme, FR
Takashi Murakami, Tokyo, JP
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, NL
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, NL
Caldic Collection, Wassenaar, NL
Free Magazine Subscription
Articles, interviews, shows & events. Delivered to your mailbox weekly.