板室温泉 大黒屋

Itamuro Onsen Daikokuya is pleased to present Nidomi / TAKE TWO, a solo exhibition by Yu Araki. This marks Araki’s second solo exhibition at Daikokuya, following Three Days, Five Nights in 2021.
Five years have passed since his previous exhibition here. During that time, Araki has continued to present his work in Japan and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Towada Art Center and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. While moving image has remained central to his practice, his work has consistently turned its attention to what lies “in between” different realms: cultures and times, reality and fiction, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.
This exhibition centers on three series—PLOTLINE, STORYBOARD, and INTERLACE—which Araki describes as “two-dimensional works made by a moving-image artist.” Although their titles draw on the language of film and moving-image production, the works themselves are made from materials such as paper, wooden panels, plastic figures, and lenticular prints. Even without moving images being projected or played, they suggest a sense of time and movement, inviting us to imagine what might have happened before and after a particular scene.
This is Araki’s first solo exhibition at Daikokuya in five years. We hope visitors will take the opportunity to spend time with his works and experience them at their own pace.
During the exhibition, we will also provide a QR code giving access to a selection of key moving-image works from Araki’s previous practice. Moving-image works require a certain amount of time to experience, even when viewing a single piece. After seeing the works presented in the Salon, visitors can choose whichever films catch their interest and watch them in their own time. Overnight guests may enjoy them at leisure in their rooms, while day visitors are likewise welcome to encounter the works at a time that suits them.
Below, Yu Araki shares his own thoughts on the exhibition.
On the Exhibition
For my second solo exhibition at Daikokuya, I have chosen the Japanese title “Nidomi” and the English title “TAKE TWO.”
To look at something once, and then look again. This is not simply a matter of starting over, but of reconsidering the same thing and searching for another pathway of perception. That is the idea I wanted to convey through the title.
My previous solo exhibition, Three Days, Five Nights, took its starting point from the experience of travelling across the International Date Line. In this exhibition, too, I attempt to explore various kinds of boundaries materially through the exhibition as a whole.
Take, for example, the boundary between seasons: autumn, the interval connecting summer and winter. It has always been my favourite season, yet in recent years its arrival and passing seem, somehow, to have become increasingly abrupt (though I hope this is only my imagination). If translated into the language of film editing, autumn might be thought of as the time that lies between one shot and the next. To me, beautiful editing is that which draws the viewer into a narrative by joining different times and spaces so naturally that neither the cut nor the trace of the edit calls attention to itself. There is a paradox here: editing creates a boundary while simultaneously making that boundary invisible. I would like the transition from summer to winter to unfold in much the same way—not as an abrupt cut, but as a cross-dissolve in which two shots slowly overlap.
This exhibition deliberately brings together scenes and motifs that are out of season. I hope they might serve as devices through which the particular sense of season that can only be felt “here and now” is illuminated from another direction, and that visitors will enjoy the shifts and fluctuations between different times, spaces, and scales.
Yu Araki