Essay on Booklet: Togetherness (or provisional community)

by Koki Tanaka

I have been exploring the question of togetherness in various ways by organizing impromptu gatherings or, one could say, temporary communities. To be with someone is to step outside convention and throw oneself into the process of negotiating with others or an unknown situation. Being together is full of impossibilities. Most of the time we are either hostile or accustomed to each other. We either divide or become a closed circle. Is it possible to maintain a critical distance from someone and still be open to them? Our potential might be somewhere between close friendship and antagonism, so to speak.

I am inspired by the perspective of “planetary thinking” these days. I think of it as an act of unraveling the parameters of our customary thinking. It lets us open our eyes to the planet (or “the world”) as well as human existence. The situation of togetherness that most of my practice plays with can be a place to re-examine human activities and rethink human relations. I hope that it might open up opportunities to speak what cannot be spoken, to see what cannot be seen, and to endure the uncertainty of our time.

I’m thinking about the form of film in the following way. All moving images can be considered documents of human activities: movies, YouTube clips, smartphone videos, and so on. After humans are gone, nonhuman (or alien) archaeologists or anthropologists of the future might find what remains, even if it is just fragments, of these vast moving image materials. It is proof of the existence of human beings in the past—of our presence. I assume that my works could also eventually become one of those artifacts.

Notes with Dates, or Something Like a Journal, No. 10

November 29–December 24, 2021: Childcare and Artistic Practice

Koki Tanaka

All of a sudden, my daughter is now one-and-a-half years old and walking around excitedly. She calls both my wife and me “Mama” (though she started calling me “Papa” as I was revising this manuscript). She says “heeyugo” when she hands us something. And she bows deeply to us when we tell her she did a good job. She picks up all kinds of words and gestures seemingly out of the blue. Sometimes we speculate that she must have learned something at daycare, only to find out the next morning that it wasn’t anything the caretakers had introduced to the children. Our daughter simply started raising her hand in response to her name being called without anyone in particular having to teach her.

Childcare is a challenge, but I’m also finding more and more enjoyment in it. It’s fun to browse children’s books with my daughter. She’ll pick out a bunch of books to read and then, when we’re in the middle of one, she’ll ask me to switch to the next. We don’t read any of them to the end (or, rather, we’ve read all of them many times over, so we already know the endings). It’s similar to browsing articles online. The Very Hungry Caterpillar will suddenly emerge from Sleeping Beauty’s thorn hedge, or Babar the Elephant will break out into the Moon Song (Otsukisama no uta) in the middle of a nighttime forest, or the puppy’s Poop! (Unko!) will fly off with the Balloon Cat (Fusen neko).

Occasionally, we end up editing a single story. My daughter wants to turn the pages herself, but she doesn’t quite have the hang of it yet, so we jump around several pages at a time. Say we’re reading Momotaro. Just when it’s time for the peach to come floating down the river, we’ll suddenly jump to Momotaro crossing the sea to the demons’ island, and then it’s the scene where he takes back the treasure from the demons and returns home to his village. But since all the intervening context has been cut out, it reads like Momotaro and the demons have switched roles. Instead of subduing the demons, Momotaro is pillaging them. He is the real demon, leading his gang of fierce animals in a raid on a peaceful island community; the demons have to give up their possessions in an attempt to bring an end to the violence.

Editing is about recombining selections from a body of preexisting material. In choosing from and rearranging the material, the editor gives it a new meaning. As I assist my daughter in her unconscious editing process, I also think about the ways my childcare practice feeds into my art practice.

One of the functions of a curator is to choose works, arrange them, and give them new meaning. At the start of this year I organized a curatorial project for the first time.¹ The online platform e-flux hosts a project called “Artist Cinemas,” in which it invites artists and filmmakers to curate a program of six videos to be screened online one at a time over the course of six weeks. I used my program to address a recurrent theme in my writing: the relationship between abstract and concrete.

My basic premise was that while “the new normal” and all the other abstract terms that have emerged out of the Covid-19 pandemic have seemingly flattened our view of the world, we still need to pay attention to our individual, concrete lives. I selected videos that supported this idea, including works by my friends, works by younger artists, and historic works. I gathered the works, arranged them in an order, and then hoped that viewers would be able to identify the theme from the content. The videos dealt with topics ranging from the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II (Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Framed, 1989) to the lack of disability pensions for Zainichi Koreans in Japan (Yuki Iiyama, Old Long Stay, 2020) and the microhistory of a silk business run by Chinese Americans in Los Angeles (Zhu Xiaowen, Oriental Silk, 2015). I felt we could learn something by revisiting these works that offer new perspectives on individual lives.

But curators are not the only ones who select things. In his essay “Multiple Authorship,” the Russian critic Boris Groys charts how the work of the artist has changed from producing artworks to selecting them. He traces this transition back to Marcel Duchamp, who is considered to be one of the first contemporary artists. Duchamp is of course most famous for his Fountain of 1917. He turned a store-bought urinal on its side, signed it “R. Mutt 1917,” and submitted it to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which he himself was helping to organize. Although the exhibition was unjuried, the work was rejected. This legendary episode is part of the legacy of Fountain. (Indeed, the original urinal has been lost.) Duchamp coined the term “readymade” to refer to artworks based on the appropriation of mass-produced items. According to Groys, producing an object is no longer sufficient as an artistic act since Duchamp and his readymades:

“The creative act has become the act of selection: since Duchamp, producing an object is no longer sufficient for its producer to be considered an artist. One must also select the object one has made oneself and declare it an artwork. Accordingly, since Duchamp there is no longer any difference between an object one produces oneself and one produced by someone else—both have to be selected in order to be considered artworks. Today an author is someone who selects, who authorizes. Since Duchamp the author has become a curator. The artist is primarily the curator of himself, because he selects his own art.”²

That’s right. In contemporary art, the artist is the curator. Even without organizing a program with other artists like I did for e-flux, the very process of selecting and displaying whatever I make is itself an act of curation. Consider what happens with an artist’s solo show. The artist has to think about which works to present and in what way, come up with a title, and then, in many cases, write a statement about the exhibition. That’s one of the main parts of an artist’s work today.

At first a curator was essentially someone who was employed by a museum or gallery to manage a collection of artworks.³ That was their job. The kind of curator who picks works and organizes an exhibition according to a theme of their choosing is a relatively recent phenomenon. For instance, you’ve likely heard of the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. He put together group shows of young artists working with installation and performative practices in the 1960s, directed major international surveys like “documenta 5” in 1972, and even made an exhibition about his grandfather. We could say it was Szeemann who triggered the shift in the presentation of works from trade fair-style displays to the new expressive medium of “exhibition making.” He gave rise to the exhibition as a manifestation of the curator’s thinking. And insofar as he brought about that transformation, we might even call Szeemann an artist of a sort. In fact, several monographs on Szeemann have been published since his death in 2005, and his exhibition-making practice remains influential even now. It’s fair to say that artists like me who consider exhibition making to be an integral part of their art practice are operating under his influence.

Though since this transition started in the 1960s, it’s a little different from the Duchampian sense of the artist as curator that Groys identifies. Rather, artists brought the act of selection into their art practices first, and then curators shifted the focus of their job from managing collections to making exhibitions (and selecting works). The funny thing is that e-flux doesn’t even use the term “curation” for its “Artist Cinemas” project. Instead, the credit is “convened by.” Not selecting, but gathering.

The truth is, I also prefer to think of what I did for e-flux as an act of gathering rather than curating or choosing. Dedicated readers of this column might recall that the counterpart to “choice” is “care.” Permit me to revisit Annemarie Mol’s The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice (Routledge, 2008) for a moment. Mol sets up an opposition between the logic of choice and the logic of care in her book. If the former is based on the idea of the autonomous individual, the latter is based on a belief in interdependent collectivity. Or we could say that the former assumes a strong agency, while the latter acknowledges a weak agency. Now try imagining a weak, interdependent artist, as opposed to an artist with a strong individuality.

The artist who creates everything on their own has a strong, autonomous individuality. Such an artist signs their name on all their creations and promotes that signature, that name. Even an artist like Duchamp who selects things can have a strong sense of judgment. They can add their signature to an exhibition of things they have selected and promote their name that way. That Szeemann’s name is now better known to history than some of the artists who participated in his exhibitions comes down to the individuality of his curation. But what I want to explore here is not the creator or the selector and rather what I would call, I suppose, the “depender.” An artist who cannot make anything happen without depending on someone else. An artist who seeks the help of collaborators and advisors and experts. An artist like me. In the end, creation has to happen collectively for me.

But I’m not talking about so-called artist collectives here. Don’t forget that many if not most artist collectives are gatherings of strong individuals, and the group’s name can be disseminated just like an artist’s signature. The collective can even hold solo exhibitions under that name. A collective can behave like an individual artist.

On the other hand, the dependent artist is always alone—always a weak agent seeking the help of someone else. The collectivity in that case is more accidental than anything else. For the dependent artist is unable to do anything on their own. And I would like to find something positive in that approach.

A gathering, in contrast to a selection, could also be a chance gathering on some occasions. There are times when things gather together due to passive acceptance rather than active choice. Being passive is not necessarily bad. It’s about accepting the reality of what you can and can’t do. It’s being real with yourself.

Raising a young child is like getting swept away in a flash flood and then having to focus all your energy on simply staying afloat without taking any time for reflection. You don’t have the luxury of trying out one approach and then another and deliberating over which one is best, because before you know it your child has already grown into a whole new phase in their development. You’re not in the position of choosing what works best for you. You’ve got to accept everything that comes along. But as I wrote in the beginning there is really something wonderful about sharing the experience of someone’s growth with that person.

And that recognition has had a major effect on my practice. If childcare is now the focus of my life, then that means that I have to adjust my working process and approach to that life. Namely, there’s a limit on the time I can spend working. One piece of advice I received from a friend who is also a parent is that whenever you have a spare moment in between looking after your child, you need to use that time to work even when you’re tired or not in the mood, because you don’t know when the next chance will come along. Basically, you’ve got to do the work when you can. You might think that you can do it later, but then your child will get sick and have to be rushed to the hospital, or you’ll stay up half the night trying to soothe them during a crying fit. All too often, there is no later. If you don’t take advantage of those in-between moments, you might not have any time at all.

The first thing I had to accept in confronting that lack of time was that I would be fine if the “quality” of my works dropped somewhat as a result. You can’t use up all your time editing video footage. You can find a way to manage within the scope of the minimum necessary amount of time. And it’s not the end of the world if the quality is no longer what it once was.

Is it a bit disillusioning for you to read that?

I’m going to give up my old particularities. I’m going to stop procrastinating until the mood to work strikes me. And I’m going to prioritize my child’s life above all else. I mean, obviously. As you can imagine, it’s not like I’m going to put off taking my child to the hospital in order to stay immersed in my video editing. So just what was this “quality” that I worked so hard to maintain? Maybe it was wrongheaded all along. Honestly, how much substance was there to that quality to begin with? It’s not like you can guarantee the quality of a work just by virtue of being particular or spending extra time on it. Here’s another way of looking at it: Maybe there’s another kind of quality that I can gain from my life as a parent?

The other day I organized a fictional radio program on prejudice. I asked my old friend, the sociologist  Han Tong-Hyon, to share some fundamental points on the topic (i.e., racism, microaggression, the Japanese law against hate speech, etc.) with students at Tokyo Zokei University. Prejudice is essentially a product of social structure. In Japan, society is made by and for the majority. Minorities are inevitably excluded from the Japanese social structure. Han used the example of a staircase—the kind that we climb every day without thinking. A staircase is necessary for getting to the upper levels of a building. Hence, buildings have staircases. But that means we’re talking about architecture that has been designed for able-bodied people. On the other hand, an elevator might serve the needs of someone in a wheelchair. What would happen if we remade society so that everything was based on the premise of people being in wheelchairs? Having an elevator in a building would be the same as having a staircase for able-bodied people. Our society would prioritize the minority, rather than the majority.

I offered up my own premise. When you ride the subway with a child in a stroller you’re always on the lookout for the elevator when you get off the train. But the elevator is usually all the way over at the other end of the platform, which gives you an idea for how inconvenient it is not just for people pushing strollers but also anyone in a wheelchair.

This connects back to the “patientism” of Annemarie Mol. It’s about building a society based not on the presumption of health but the presumption of sickness. Patientism is not about making sick people adjust to the needs of healthy people. It’s a proposal to establish social infrastructure based on the body of the patient. Dealing with an illness can be physically debilitating. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be worthwhile to install an extra walkway or elevator somewhere if it helped to relieve that debilitation for someone? It happened to me. Right after I had my brain surgery it was hard to even walk. Wherever I went I would always first check to see where the elevators and escalators were located. The visual stimulation of a crowd was so intense that it was painful, and I had to alter my path to avoid it. I’d like for society to work as well as possible for people with sick bodies.

What should we choose as our premise? What should we prioritize? Society would change drastically depending on how you answer those questions. As Covid-19 progresses from an epidemic to a pandemic and then becomes endemic, it looks as though we are just going to have to learn to live with this contagion—though it may be tough dealing with it year-round, and not just seasonally like the flu. We should probably hang on to our masks.

Now let me try bringing this back to my art practice one more time. What is my premise? My child is part of my life. As such, my child is also part of my art practice. As I wrote earlier, I can no longer spend all day working on my art. Nor can I just pack up and head off on an international residency whenever the opportunity arises. Everything begins from accepting these things I can no longer do as givens. Or indeed has already begun. For instance, if I have to meet someone or do a talk, I’m more or less free on weekdays between 10 am and 4 pm while my child is at daycare, and it’s easy for me to schedule an appointment during that window. But it’s not so easy for most people to make time to see an artist talk on a weekday afternoon. At best, that window can work well for international events, depending on the time difference. One side effect of the pandemic is that remote talks are normal now, which helps me. I can also use the time at night after 9 or 10 pm once I’ve put my child to bed. Just the other day I participated in a remote talk with a curator in New York (morning) that was organized by a foundation in London (afternoon) from my home in Kyoto (evening). I’m more or less able to stay on top of my work as long as the schedule lines up like that.

So, yes, there may be less time to spend on making art. But starting from that real experience may help me to realize things that I haven’t been able to before. There are surely ways of artmaking and ideas for works and new, alternate forms of quality that only that lifestyle can make possible.

At a meeting the other day, I told everyone there that one reason for my interest in care theory is that childcare is so challenging that I’ve been looking for an escape in theory, in a sense. One of the other participants responded with a suggestion. “If that’s so, then you should make sure to have another host who is not ‘looking for an escape’ if you want to organize an event on care.” I guess this person thought that what I meant by “escape in theory” was that I was trying to use theory to get out of doing actual childcare. But the whole point of care theory is that it emerges from real situations and problems. On top of which, my daughter is right here walking around in front of me and my childcare routine is right here with me. There’s no “escape” for me in literal terms. It’s more like I’m going back and forth between my hectic life and theory, but I guess some people just don’t get that.

Perhaps another form of quality will emerge from my limited time and focus. I need theory, ideas, and invention to boost that capability. This journal-like series of notes is also a space for me to sort out my thoughts. Writing, making, selecting, depending. There are still many things I can do with the aid of the perspective, physicality, alternate thinking, and new techniques that I can discover only through my new daily reality.

I’d like to think that my artistic practice is starting over now along with my daughter’s first steps.

What do you think?

I guess it’s going to take a bit more time.

First published in Japanese as “Hizuke no aru nōto, moshikuwa nikki no yō na mono, dai-10 kai: Ikuji to geijutsu jissen—11 gatsu 29 nichi kara 12 gatsu 24 nichi,” in Genron β 68 (Genron, 2021).

NOTES

1. Koki Tanaka, “Faraway, So Close,” e-flux Film, April 19, 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/388880/faraway-so-close.

2. Boris Groys, “Multiple Authorship,” in Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), 93–94. 

3. “Curator,” Tate.org, accessed November 29, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/curator.

Thematic Texts

1. Extending the Temporary

A recurring theme across Koki Tanaka’s practice, the temporary serves as a unifying thread in this exhibition. Marked by unpainted partition walls, exposed supports, casually pasted posters, and freely scattered chairs, the exhibition design evokes a temporary gathering, recalling the makeshift structures of disaster relief, emergency shelters, or indoor “campsites” born of confinement. Each of these reference points brings to mind the sudden crises of everyday life and the spontaneous communities of mutual aid that emerge in their wake. Tanaka grew interested in these topics after experiencing the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and other public emergencies. Since then, he has made the organization of experimental, temporary collectives a central concern of his practice. In a notable series of video works, Tanaka invites people from different fields to collectively attempt acts normally carried out alone, such as playing the piano, making pottery, and writing poetry. He transforms these acts into collaborative processes that draw out both the tensions and potential inherent to shared creation. Tanaka leaves the creative process to the participants, refraining from interfering, and instead facilitates and documents these moments of temporary collectivity.

His more recent projects have shifted toward open-ended workshops, without fixed tasks or narratives. Tag Game (2024), for example, invites participants to play tag while reading aloud accounts of their experiences during the pandemic. Commissioned by UCCA for this exhibition, Tanaka’s latest work 10 Years (2025) reunites a group of people who participated in one of his works as high schoolers in 2015. Together, they share the changes they have experienced and the insights they have gained over the past decade. Through these ad-hoc temporary collectives, Tanaka aims to unsettle the stagnation of rigid social structures. His works encourage individuals to negotiate and explore through open dialogue, and in doing so generate dynamic principles for responding to a changing world.

2. Editing as Artistic Practice

In his work, Koki Tanaka positions editing as a form of authorship. For Tanaka, editing is not only a creative method but also a gesture of openness, a means through which to share authorship between artist, material, and viewer, and a reminder that history itself is always subject to reinterpretation.

Before fully committing to his practice as an artist, Tanaka worked as an editor for an art magazine, an experience that shaped his understanding of how meaning is produced not simply by creating new material, but by reordering what already exists. His video and text projects draw their structure not from linear narratives but through processes of recombination, layering, and juxtaposition, in doing so foregrounding the role of the editor as a maker of meaning.

Tanaka’s approach resonates with literary theorist Roland Barthes’s description of the text as a weave of fragments. Rather than positioning himself as the singular origin of meaning, Tanaka redistributes authorship across the participants, situations, and everyday gestures that constitute his works. Therefore, editing functions not as simply a technical step but as a method of revealing how meaning emerges between these fragments and between people.

This logic extends into the exhibition space itself. When viewers encounter Tanaka’s works, they too become editors: noticing different details, linking moments across works, and assembling their own narrative from dispersed elements. In this way, the exhibition is not a fixed story but a field of possibilities, where meaning is produced collaboratively through acts of selection, attention, and arrangement.

3. Performing the Real

It is conventionally assumed that subjects in documentary films are engaged in their “natural” everyday behavior. Yet as theorists such as Michael Renov and Stella Bruzzi have argued, the camera complicates the very reality it seeks to record, whether due to the filmmaker’s manipulations or the subjects’ self-awareness. In his video practice, Koki Tanaka makes the unstable dynamics of documentary representation visible: participants in his works read aloud lines they have written prior to filming, sometimes holding their scripts before the camera. By acknowledging the process of scripting and performance, the artist reveals a different kind of authenticity, one that arises not from spontaneity, but by showing how the self is constructed and presented. Furthermore, he frequently complicates the binary relationship between filmmaker and subject by inviting project participants to film each other. In works like Mobility and Extinction (2024), this shifting ecology of roles positions documentary not as transparent record but as a negotiated field of performance, exchange, and power.

Another recent work, Acting is Sharing Something Personal (2025), marks a turning point in Tanaka’s practice. Whereas earlier projects drew directly on participants’ own experiences, here he engages professional actors to perform lines taken from interviews he conducted with salarymen and women working in Tokyo’s central business district. By rearticulating personal experiences through actors’ bodies and voices, Tanaka underscores how the documentary subject is not the sole source of meaning; It is merely part of a process of mediation, scripting, editing, and performance, through which subjectivity is continually reconfigured. In this sense, Tanaka not only unsettles the illusion of documentary authenticity but also destabilizes the boundaries of personal narrative and authorship itself. His works remind us that editing is never a neutral operation, but a generative act through which meaning, identity, and history are actively remade.

4. Everyday Resistance

In his practice, Koki Tanaka continually explores the potential of everyday actions, positioning them as a means of resisting the abstractions that increasingly dominate our lives. As part of the generation that grew up after the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, the artist and his peers faced the social realities of a long-term recession. Many turned their back on grand narratives, instead searching for transformative possibilities within the details of everyday life. The exhibition features a number of Tanaka’s early works reflecting this mindset. For instance, in Everything is Everything (2006) he uses repetitive movements to test and explore the physical properties of unremarkable objects like hangers, cups, and mattresses. The actions featured in this work may appear absurd or monotonous, yet also seem to hint at epiphanies.  

After relocating to Los Angeles in 2009, Tanaka began to focus more on everyday interpersonal interactions. He organizes unusual collaborative scenarios and then documents the unconscious behaviors that participants engage in, exploring the group dynamics of these micro-societies and temporary communities. While his recent works often take major social problems or global upheavals as their starting points, they maintain a focus on specific individuals and issues, examining the challenges people face—and they insights they gain—within macroscale events and trends.

Tanaka also frequently records his daily experiences in diaries and essays, which he considers to be part of his artistic practice. For example, the birth of his daughter prompted him to reflect on parenting, which he sees as connected to his creative process. Writings on these topics, along with images of his daily life as a parent captured on his phone, are presented in the exhibition, where they at once constitute an artwork and part of the overall spatial design.

5. Care and Nurture

Whether prompted by public health crises or his own experience of daily life as a parent, in recent years Koki Tanaka has come to realize the importance of caring for and nurturing others—acts that have historically been regarded as feminine, and as such often looked down upon or ignored. Throughout our lives, we all move between the roles of caregiver and cared-for, with independence being the exception, rather than the norm. This topic lies at the core of much of his recent work: In Reflective Notes (Reconfiguration) (2021), Tanaka uses diaristic narration and footage of everyday scenes to candidly discuss pandemic-era protective policies, reexamining the meaning of interpersonal care and connection. These themes are expanded into a wide-ranging inquiry into our precarious global social context in Mobility and Extinction (2024).

Photographs and texts offering candid glimpses of the artist’s experiences as a parent are also scattered throughout the exhibition, illustrating from an additional perspective his ongoing exploration of the conditions of life, as framed by a sense of responsibility rooted in our interdependence. He further extends this thinking and practice towards topics including the division of labor, discrimination and prejudice, ecological and social crises, and more. Through his focus on theories of care, Tanaka confronts the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of our present moment, calling for a transformative politics of interpersonal relationships and care.