Dates

2020.08.19(Wed)~09.06(Sun)
* Closed on Saturday, Monday, Tuesday
* Open on only last Sunday

Opening Time

13:00 – 19:00

Venue

http://calmandpunk.com/

“Are you interested in unearned income?”

It all started with this nonchalant question asked by Shiratori who was visiting Koike in Venice, Italy.

Kensuke Koike’s work, made purely by using a simple cut and paste method on vintage photographs, creates unexpected visual effects; nothing is added to or subtracted from the images. Fans of his work exist all over the world, and his followers on social media spread their inspirations through, for example, #singleimageprocessing. However, since each of his pieces are unique, the number of production is limited. In order to balance demand and supply, he decided to print t-shirts using his artworks.

Koike came up with a portrait t-shirt titled “Unknown”. The portrait used on this print was randomly selected from his photo archive consisting of over 50,000 images that he collected throughout Europe. The eyes, the nose and the mouth of the subject were extracted from the portrait. While pondering about the expansion of this project, Kawano joined the team.

Together with visual director Midori Kawano and media artist Kei Shiratori, visual artist Koike launched his project “POLE & TOTEM” in July of 2020 through its e-commerce site.

Anyone can purchase the work “Unknown” in the form of a t-shirt through its online store. In line with this first t-shirt design, limited “special edition” pieces and one-and-only “unique” pieces drop regularly to continue the portrait series. These items are readymade yet unique. Another benefit to this collection is the fact that it is seasonless, thus never wasting any resources.

When single motif is used repeatedly, it deepens its possibility — yet it blurs the importance of its existence. Perhaps this brings up the question of the added value in these items created by using common materials and an open-source process.

” Is it art or clothing?”

This exhibition will present not only the archive of their e-commerce website, but a number of unreleased works as well as AR works produced via mobile devices.

Needless to say, this exhibition has taken a completely different direction than initially planned due to the participants’ passion and determination in facing unknown materials.