Film & Video (Film & Video)

The wall installation Friction/Where is Lavatory (2005) plays off anxieties about time but utilizes sound to create a disconcerting experience of viewership: comprised of dozens of wall clocks sutured together, the work presents a monstrous vision of time at its most monumental. The clocks, however, are effectively broken, altered so that the second hand of each clock obstructs one another as they sweep across the face. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living. The performance narrative unfolds upon the circular movements of the turntable. A chicken’s leg replaces the turntable’s arm.

Installation (Installation)

In Permanent Laughter (2011), dozens of portable compasses are scattered under a sheet of acrylic board, which is in turned covered with what appear to be the diffuse remains of an unidentified skeleton. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization. His work frequently interrogates how we organize space and time through discretely measured units, and in parodying that obsessively precise ways that we mark our very existence – through instruments that direct our bodily movements or denote our sense of time – Taiyo invites us to consider our relationship not just to devices but to our very sense of ontological being.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.