On viewFree
Meiro KoizumiArt Sonje Center
Meiro Koizumi: The Fire, an Archive
고이즈미 메이로: 불, 어느 아카이브
About the exhibition
Three-channel video, virtual reality, charcoal drawings and sculpture fill Space 2, on the third floor of Art Sonje Center. The center calls this Meiro Koizumi's first institutional solo show in Korea. The works look at what war and nationalism left behind in postwar Japan and at how memories of violence pass from one generation to the next. Sunjung Kim curated the show.
Financial News describes the show's concern as "social forgetting," the way memories of violence get erased from a society. It reports that the video The Angels of Testimony (2019) sets young performers reading veterans' testimony against an older man who cannot fully remember the violence he testified to.
About the artist
Meiro Koizumi (b. 1976, Gunma Prefecture, Japan) lives and works in Yokohama. The artist studied at International Christian University in Tokyo and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2005 and 2006. Koizumi works in video, performance, drawing, sculpture and virtual reality. The artist's solo shows include a 2013 project at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2021 Koizumi was one of six artists jointly awarded the Artes Mundi 9 prize, for The Angels of Testimony, and won the Grand Prize in the Art Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival for the VR theater piece Prometheus Bound.
Sources: Meiro Koizumi: official site · Art Sonje Center: exhibition page
