UCCA Beijing Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
UCCA Dune Open Today, 9:30-19:30 (Final entry: 19:00)
UCCA Edge Closed Today,
UCCA Clay Open Today, 9:00-18:00 (Final entry: 17:30)
Audio Guide
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
UCCA Beijing
Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
798, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing
Tel: +86 10 5780 0200
Fax: +86 10 5780 0200
UCCA Dune
Open Today, 9:30-19:30 (Final entry: 19:00)
Aranya Gold Coast, Beidaihe
Tel: +86 335 7522 652
UCCA Edge
Closed Today, 10:00-19:00
2F, No. 88 Xizang Bei Lu, Jing'an District, Shanghai
Tel: +86 21 6628 6861
UCCA Clay
Open Today, 9:00-18:00 (Final entry: 17:30)
West Entrance, Creative & Cultural Ceramic Avenue, Dingshu Town, Yixing City, Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province
Tel: +86 0510 8767 9989
