Red Forests and Blue Clouds (2022), a new sound installation by Daisuke Kosugi, is presented in a training room of the former nursing school where eight beds remain. Approaching the beds, one hears dialogue and descriptions of scenes involving various characters, including a man, a young girl, her mother, a nurse and someone who is evidently a patient, an elderly man and woman, and some children, spoken in subdued tones through speakers. In the training room (formerly a place of practice and acquisition of knowledge for the care of human life from birth to death), there is a neutral atmosphere, somehow devoid of the urgent reality of life and death. Here the drama of life and death is supplied only by the imagination, synchronized with a sense of “the unspoken” behind the audible sounds in the work. By making the rounds of hospital beds, visitors become active spectators, and in fact performers choreographed by Kosugi.

After experiencing life as a company employee in Tokyo, Kosugi studied art in Norway, and has explored the question of “whether pain can be communicated (to others)” through video, sculpture, and performance. He investigates how art can respond to pain that is difficult to verbalize or manifest, ranging from wounds caused by social conflict and lack of freedom, to trauma and healing, to empathy fatigue suffered by caregivers such as medical professionals. Red Forests and Blue Clouds explores, in abstract terms, the tension between “reality as data in visible form” conveyed through screens, manipulated by visual technology to present only what we want to see, and “reality as lived by flesh and blood bodies.” In satellite imaging utilizing invisible light wavelengths, forests are sometimes displayed in red and clouds in blue. If we attune our senses to the sound of the work, we can catch glimpses of everyday life during the pandemic and the outbreak of wars. This poses challenges to our lived reality, and to the imagination required to see through a world saturated with data and simulations.

Kosugi graduated from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and has since had a solo exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris (2019). Group exhibitions include the MOT Annual 2021 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the 2016 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.

Selected Exhibitions & Awards

2022

Somewhat Infrequently (solo), Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London, UK

2021

MOT Annual 2021 A sea, a living room and a sea, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan

2019

A False Weight (solo), Jeu de Paume, Paris, France

2016

11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea

Exhibition

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• Red Forests and Blue Clouds, 2022
• Photo: ToLoLo studio