Tanaka naoki Official website

Artist Statement

My practice investigates the conditions through which meaning comes into being.
Rather than understanding reality, social systems, or perception as fixed entities
possessing inherent essence, I approach them as dynamic structures continuously
produced through relationships among countless constituent elements. My work
seeks not to define meaning itself, but to make perceptible the processes through
which meaning becomes possible.
 

This inquiry originated in my experience of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji
Earthquake. Witnessing the sudden collapse and subsequent reconstruction of the
city profoundly altered my understanding of stability. What had appeared
permanent—a city, a society, or a shared system of values—revealed itself to be
contingent, sustained by innumerable interdependent relationships. The experience
shifted my perspective from seeing reality as something given to understanding it
as something continually constituted.

This way of thinking resonates with the Buddhist principle of dependent origination
( engi ), expressed in the Heart Sutra as “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” in
which existence is understood not as an intrinsic essence but as something arising
through conditions and relationships. I also recognize a philosophical affinity with
Marcel Duchamp's Ready-made, which relocated artistic meaning from the object
itself to the interplay of object, context, and perception. Although these traditions
emerge from different historical and cultural contexts, both question the
assumption of fixed essence and instead reveal meaning as relational and
contingent.

My work develops this relational understanding into a material practice. I replace
the conventional pixel—the smallest unit of a digital image—with everyday objects
or custom-designed puzzle pieces. These units are not simply formal components
but bear cultural memory, social function, and material specificity. Individually they
remain recognizable objects; collectively they generate images and meanings that
cannot be reduced to any single element. As viewers move through the work,
perception oscillates between part and whole, object and image, material and
concept. In this movement, meaning is experienced not as something contained
within objects but as something emerging through their relationships.

While this methodology acknowledges the historical legacy of Pop Art's
engagement with everyday commodities, my concern lies elsewhere. Everyday
objects function as relational units that expose the often invisible processes
through which perception, value, and social reality are organized. By transforming
familiar materials into structures of interdependence, I seek to shift attention from
the object itself to the conditions through which significance is produced.

My installations do not seek to resolve meaning or offer definitive interpretations.
Instead, they open a space in which viewers may become aware of the relational
processes through which perception and understanding continually take shape. In
doing so, the work invites reflection not only on what we see, but on the conditions
that make seeing—and meaning itself—possible.