November 18, 2017–January 8, 2018
Art Gallery Miyauchi
4347-2, Miyauchi
Hatsukaichi City Hiroshima 738-0034
Japan
Hours: Thursday–Monday 11am–6pm
miyauchiaf.or.jp
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“By creating a melee of mashups using cutting-edge work from a variety of contemporary practitioners, this project celebrates fallibility and ambiguity in the creative processes and developments of the post-internet era. Repurposing failure to unexpected fruitfulness; the results may take the form of a “distorted syntax” or “grammatical error” in our perception. Whimsical paraphrases and manipulative displacements are intended to act as a wedge, causing a rupture in an already shaky rationality and feeding a burgeoning uncertainty.”
–Floating Urban Slime/Sublime, Director, Yutaka Inagawa
On January 7, 2017, UK’s Daily Mail ran a report on British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s victory in the US. forcing McDonald’s to stop using “pink slime” in its burger recipe. Coined by Oliver, “pink slime” is a process where ammonium hydroxide is used to convert fatty beef off-cuts into a beef filler for McDonald’s burgers in the US. It is “considered part of the [component in a production procedure] by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), consumers may not know when the chemical is in their food.”
This “pink slime” saga exposed a disturbing cultural malfunction within our world today. The fixations on the internet and digital manipulations in our highly systematized contemporary life styles have distorted our perceptions as most human interactions are conducted within a “jpg-compressed” cultural environment. “Pink slime” is akin to digitized fragments of manipulated realities, drifting and clogging the cyberspace like bacteria, slowly crumbling and destroying existing mono-cultural structures.
“Pink slime” is symptom to a dysfunctional / hyper-functional society where any event could easily be distorted and re-presented as something else; where histories are carelessly erased and rendered untraceable. The modus operandi for contemporary thinkers living in such uncertainties and illusory social environment should be nonlinear, organic and experimental to avoid being trapped in logic and a rational mode of thinking. When facing uncertainties, it is perhaps worthwhile taking time to entertain our inner irrational thoughts, which may be the key to understanding the contemporary sublime.
Participating practitioners
Sze Yang Boo (Singapore) / James Brooks (UK) / Hua Kuan Chen Sai (Singapore) / Yutaka Inagawa (Japan) / Megumi Iwafuchi (Japan) / Shoji Katsume (Studio Niji) (Japan) / Lens (Japan) / Rupert Loydell (Uk) / Soshi Matsunobe (Japan) / Kiyohito Mikami (Japan) / Nicola Morrison (UK) / Hiroko Nakajima (Japan) / Tamaki Ono (Japan) / Wong Ping (Hong Kong) / Tatsuo Sugimoto (Japan) / Shooshie Sulaiman (Malaysia) / Martin Thomas (UK) / We+ (Japan) / Ryota Yamada (Japan) / Peter Yeoh (UK)
In association with: The Miyauchi Art Foundation
Supported by: National Arts Council Singapore
With additional assistance from: Edouard Malingue Gallery, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Hagiwara Projects
Presented and Directed by: Yutaka Inagawa
Assisted by: Hitomi Kanemoto (Studio Niji)
Design direction: Shoji Katsume (Studio Niji)
FUSS Countdown: Tatsuo Sugimoto & Yutaka Inagawa
Media Partner: Glass Magazine Performance: Hiroko Nakajima + FUSS
FUSS Talk: structure design & operation by Kiyohito Mikami & Yutaka Inagawa
Contact: Art Gallery Miyauchi (4347-2 Miyauch, Hatsukaichishi, Hiroshima）
T +81(0)829 30 8511 / F +81(0)829 39 8931 / agm [at] miyauchiaf.or.jp（Miharu Imai）
Last entry: 5:30pm. Closed on Tuesday, Wednesday and December 30–January 3.
