01/10/2026
We would like to extend our warmest thanks to Meiro Koizumi and Tom Denman for a fascinating talk concerning Koizumi’s new exhibition at the Daiwa Foundation, 'Spirit of Automatism'.
Koizumi introduced his talk by outlining his view on the role of art in a morally compromised world: to confront the challenges we face in a multitude of ways. For instance, he argued that Japan has yet to truly deal with its history as an aggressor and that it has long been taboo to ask about what one’s grandparents did during the War; now, as they pass away, there is no one left to speak of their experiences or wear the scars of war, leaving art as one of the means by which these testimonies can be conserved.
One such example would be Koizumi’s own work, 'The Angels of Testimony', a three-channel video installation centring on 99-year-old war veteran Hajime Kondo, who was deployed to China for four years during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Kondo began releasing testimonies related to his experiences at the age of seventy, and in the central channel of the work reflects on his actions as a perpetrator, despite his failing memory. On the other two channels 11 Japanese young people, aged between 16 and 26, recite Kondo’s testimonies on the streets of Tokyo in a deadpan yet affecting manner.
According to Koizumi, he and his team secured Kondo’s participation through the cooperation of his daughter, who gave them an hour to interview a willing Kondo. Koizumi described the intensity of the interview, with Kondo claiming to forget some things whilst denying others and bursting into tears as Koizumi asked him about his actions during the war and the atrocities to which he was party. Koizumi described Kondo as ‘letting his words out’, an effect he wanted to capture through the young people whom he asked to memorise testimonies of their choice and recite them on the streets of Tokyo. Particularly affecting, for Koizumi, was an actor who told him of her struggles to articulate the testimony of a Chinese woman gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, with whose experiences, as a young woman, she could identify.
Koizumi then went on to describe his engagement with sculpture, which began two to three years ago and is represented in the exhibition by a new addition to his 'Altars' series. He described his intent to move away from dealing directly with war, focusing on the more abstract questions of what we are and what it means to be human in a time in which science and technology is ‘updating’ us before we have the chance to grasp the consequences. Until then Koizumi had worked only with images (including video and virtual reality); his shift to sculpture was part of his desire to focus on the materiality of our existence. Wishing to avoid the ‘machine man’ cliché, Koizumi explained that he wanted to make the figures intertw**ed with the machinery look as though they were suffering, making the work of art an object that projects the viewer’s anxieties and frustrations.
The final part of Koizumi’s presentation dealt with the last artwork featured in the exhibition, 'Soluble Meat'. To create it, he fed images from an old Japanese book on how to hypnotise people, 'Lecture on the Latest Experimental Hypnosis' by Tatsugoro Murakami, into the AI video generator Luma Dream Machine and repeatedly gave Luma the same prompt: ‘This is a tragic film in which humans lose their free will.’ Afterwards, he asked Google Gemini to interpret the resultant moving images and produce a film script based on its interpretation, which was then read by another AI voice-over programme.
Koizumi explained that his interest in hypnosis stemmed from its ability to make human beings feel like mere machines, and that the work was intended to highlight this mechanical side of human beings. Yet it was also intended to demonstrate the unoriginal, repetitive nature of AI creation. Koizumi described how the first five minutes of the finished product was interesting, but that as it went on, he realised that the AI was repeating the same words over and over again. He concluded that this was evidence of AI’s ability to make something that sounds deep and human, but is actually based on familiar patterns that are simply uninteresting for human beings. On a brighter note, Koizumi argued that this reveals our unique nature as patterns (our mechanical side) that want to break patterns (our human side).
Following Koizumi’s talk, we had the pleasure of following a conversation between him and art writer Tom Denman, who asked him questions probing the nature of Koizumi’s dialogue with Kondo and the implicit sense of trust underlying it; the relationship between the various layers in 'The Angels of Testimony', with the young reciting the words of an elderly veteran in a different form; whether there is a therapeutic element to the same work; the open-ended nature of Koizumi’s art; and whether the idea of a ‘hosting body’ that embodies the past to prevent its being forgotten had anything to do with Koizumi’s move into sculpture.
Finally, our audience had the chance to ask their own questions, and asked, amongst other perceptive questions, about the relation, if any, between Koizumi’s work and his own grandfathers, who were also war veterans; the role of art in relation to the state; and whether through sculpture he has ultimately found his medium.
We would like to extend our deepest thanks to both speakers once again, as well as to our excellent audience.
If you have yet to see the exhibition, you can find more details about it here: https://tinyurl.com/3c5k9az2
