Trending Photo News No. 12: Yu Araki transforms discommunication into video

"It's like my existence itself is an error," laughs artist Araki Yu.

Araki is a notable artist, with his works being exhibited as part of this year's program (February 2nd - 18th) of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, held annually at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and his solo exhibition, which began on December 9th of last year and is currently being held at the Towada Art Center.

Araki has released a series of videos that humorously depict misunderstandings and mistranslations, including silent footage of a Japanese KISS cover band, an interview with a foreign language teaching assistant living in Towada City, and footage of foreigners experiencing sitting in seiza.

Araki's style is closely linked to his upbringing: he moved to the United States with his parents at the age of three, which led him to begin to question his own identity.

Araki had wanted to be a manga artist since childhood, and became fascinated with drawing manga illustrations. However, when he was unable to create manga stories, he gave up and instead focused on his artwork. He studied art at high school and university in the United States, and his skills were put to good use when he returned to Japan and entered the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts.

"When editing the video, I consciously consider the relationships between images and connect them together. Just as sculpture can show various aspects, I try to use my own skills and experience to show the ambiguity and fluctuation of images and symbols."

Having gained a bicultural experience in both America and Japan, Araki began working as an interpreter while also creating artwork, as he pondered deeply on language and translation. This experience led him to the major theme of miscommunication. The first major miscommunication he experienced in his life was caused by his own name.

"When I first moved to America, I didn't understand a word of English or Japanese, and one of my American teachers suddenly said 'You' during a book reading. My name is Yu, so even though it was just a line from the book, I mistook him for my name and immediately stood up. The other kids started laughing, and I remember feeling really embarrassed. In English-speaking countries, 'you' is a pronoun, so it can refer to your name but also to someone else."

Araki turns his identity worries into his strengths.

"A while ago, a Korean friend told me, 'That's a nice name,' and when I answered, 'Why?', he said, 'Yu Araki = You are lucky.' I thought, 'Oh, that's true!' and since then I've actually liked it. I've come to think that all the miscommunication I'd had about my name up until now was actually good luck."

This incident became the starting point for Araki's wordplay, and continues to inspire him to this day.

"Miscommunication and mistranslations are connections between things that would normally be unconnected. I saw great potential in that. That's why I used a pun on the words "constellation" and "seiza" (sitting upright) as the motif for my piece "Mitsutsuki Tabi," which I exhibited at the Pola Museum of Art's "Connections" exhibition. Puns are actually a way of playing with meanings that make a leap. Even when people are speaking the same Japanese language, sometimes they can't understand each other. I think miscommunication isn't just a matter of language, it's also a matter of wavelength."

He also studied the attitude of creating "something never before seen" at the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School.

"My teachers always told me to 'make something that has never been seen before.' I struggled to think about what it was that I had never seen before, and my stomach started to hurt. That's when I realized I'd never seen the inside of my own body. So I made a work using a gastroscope. The camera goes into the stomach, and there's a small plastic doll sitting there. For the first time, I felt a sense of accomplishment, having created something that exceeded my imagination, and after I presented it, it gradually began to be recognized as a work of art. In a way, I extended my body and turned it into a film set."

Hiroko Tasaka, a curator at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, says of Araki, "Araki's originality lies in how he expresses the observer's perspective."

"If we think of moving images as a question of images, then the more information we are overwhelmed with, the more important it becomes to delve deeply into the question of humans and images, transcending the categories of physical film and photography, art and entertainment. I hope that Araki will continue to create works that ambitiously delve deeper into the question of images, without loosening his gaze, even in places that transcend such genres."

A road movie shot in Iceland that will be screened at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions this year also "mistranslates" the world.

"Whenever I travel, I look forward to tasting the local food. But when I went to the outskirts of Iceland, all I could find were ultra-American diners. They had 25 different types of hamburgers, all named after places on Route 66 in the US. That's when I got the idea to make a road movie about Route 66. I wanted to make a fictional road movie, and depict a fake America that doesn't exist in America."

Araki's next step is film.

"It's my dream to do a feature film. I was so desperate to win an Academy Award that I even had a kokeshi doll craftsman carve a wooden Oscar statue for me (laughs). I aspire to create a big story, but I want to do it in my own way."

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