Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin

Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.

Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.

Tatsumi Hijikata & Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata @ Nonaka-Hill In Los Angeles

As Japan urbanized in the economic boom period in the decades following WWII, Hosoe felt a growing sense of urgency to revisit the rural Tohoku region where he had been evacuated as a child to escape Tokyo air-raids.  The photographer enlisted dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who is from the same Tohoku region, to enact the "sickle-toothed weasel", a vicious god of local folklore and a threat that terrorized the young displaced Hosoe, who also associates his time in that region with an innocent happiness within an otherwise dark period.  Hosoe said:

“In the village, he played with children, was laughed at by farmers along the roadside, shat in the middle of a field, attacked a bride, kidnapped a baby, and ran through the rural landscape. Almost all the shooting was done guerrilla style in a flash. This was something that could only be achieved through photography. No other medium — film, television, painting, or novel — could have been used in its place. At that moment, I was certain of the superiority of photography.” - Eikoh Hosoe, “Foreword” in Kamaitachi 1. Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata is on view through November 30 at Nonaka-Hill 720 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

Takuro Tamayama & Tiger Tateishi @ Nonaka-Hill In Los Angeles

At the gallery entrance, Takuro Tamayama’s monochrome yellow new video “Dance”, 2019 is played on a small monitor. A red curtain leads to Tamayama’s transformation of the gallery’s largest space into a colored light saturated immersive experience, entitled “Eclipse Dance”, 2019. A cluster of tables forms a new plateau and divides the atmosphere’s light, red above and blue below. A rotating marble form, evocative of a human, is positioned in relation to another form, evocative of a celestial body. In the adjacent spaces, visitors encounter Tamayama’s Eclipse, a new large-scale video projection, with sound composed by the artist. In a third space, Tamayama’s spinning sculpture and clustered confronts Tateishi’s Rotating Fuji (1991), and a fourth room, painted yellow, displays Tateishi’s prints dating from 1973-1981.

The exhibition is on view through August 31 720 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Nonaka-Hill

Wunderkind Chinese Photographer Ren Hang Has First Solo Show In Japan

Opening tonight in Tokyo, at the Matchbaco Gallery, wunderkind Chinese photographer Ren Hang will present new photographs taken in New York City. A new publication featuring works from this series will be published by Session Press and distributed by Dashwood Books. Ren Hang "New Love" will open tonight at Matchbaco Gallery and it will run until July 25, 2015.