Norio Imai, Time Scape

“I find everything on earth a resource. Tangible things including wood, steel, and fabric, intangible things such as light, air, as well as people, social events all inspire me in my artwork.” Norio Imai

Norio Imai’s sixty-year-long artistic career reflects his avant-garde position at the forefront of artistic movements and during rapid societal change. The exhibition, Norio Imai: Time Scape, features fifteen works, including vintage photographs and videos from the 1970s and ‘80s and the newly created installation “The Video Age,” (2023). Time Scape is the first exhibition outside of Japan to focus on Imai’s photography and video art and demonstrates the artist’s intriguing mastery of constantly shuttling between various media and materials.

Throughout his work, Imai has attempted to visually reveal time, the ever-elusive invisible subject, via the theme of “accumulation and visualisation of time”. The artist’s language of photographs and videos is born out of his interest in evolving time and the ‘space’ it occupies. Imai’s oeuvre grew alongside the fascinating developments in his native country as changes in the Japanese economy and society transformed in eras of rapid economic growth and expansion.

In 1965, at the age of nineteen as the youngest member of the Gutai Art Association in 1965, Imai created white relief paintings on shaped canvases. Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s founding leader, was astounded by Imai's work, which strongly promoted spatiality, as though he had turned an entire wall into a work of art interspersed with stones—or ‘canvases’—in spots, much like the Zen Garden of Ryōan-ji Temple. Imai's work expanded beyond the two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional space and even incorporated the surrounding environment.

As the prevalence of televisions expanded in 1960, a non-traditional value system began to emerge in Japan. The statement, “The medium is the message”, advocated by media and culture critic, Marshall McLuhan, drew Imai’s attention. He took particular interest in the abstract rather than the methods and contents of media transmission. All the said interests, apprehensions, and dehumanisation convinced the audience that video and photography were the media best suited to reflect the epochal character. Imai's works gradually transformed from the concept of materiality to immateriality from the mid-1960s onward. He began to explore unique ways of using film and photographic techniques to capture time in a haptic sense and methods of expression that visualised time in a comprehensive manner.

Installed at the gallery’s entrance is the work, “Landscape with Camera” (1970), and the first room displays a series of photographs from “Red Light” (1976). Imai embarked on his journey of performative photographic expression surrounding time in these artworks. “Landscape with Camera” is a photograph taken in front of Imai's home in Osaka with the subject's camera and opposing cameras moving toward each other. “Red Light” is a series of photographs that Imai encountered on the street and depicts construction sites, local fashion, and street signs that reflect the historical time while highlighting the red traffic lights meant to warn Japanese society to “stand still” as they relentlessly kept on running in those days. Imai always carried a camera, as if the camera was a part of his body. This may have made him appear innovative at the time, but this is perhaps a reminder of the contemporary practice of young urbanites who capture urban landscapes with their cell phones, post them on social media sites, and archive the images.

In “Temporal Landscape / Abenosuji” (1977), Imai visualises the displacement of time by double exposure of the respective red and blue views of traffic lights at a pedestrian crossing on a large street in his Osaka neighborhood. The self-made, gelatin silver print greatly contributes to the work’s pronounced historical and artistic value. Imai created an archive of time by capturing ordinary, everyday scenes that would normally be forgotten. He successfully gave time volume and materiality by exhibiting a series of 1-6 photographs, which expanded the present moment into layers of perception and action. He used “landscape photography”—a landscape or scene that vastly differs according to individual memories and experiences—to express artistic and regional qualities existing in the ordinary.

Imai began creating video works in the late 1960s. As his creative work settled on time, in the 1970s he started pursuing performative video expressions based on his primary theme. In “On Air” (1980), while filming a TV monitor with a video camera instead of winding up recorded tape onto an open reel, he wrapped the tape protruding from the deck around the TV set itself, endlessly until the screen was almost hidden.

Imai utilised the materiality of videotape, as expressed through its texture, and feel, and focussed on the importance of visualisation of time. Created in the summer of 2023 for this exhibition is the installation, “The Video Age” (2023), which is displayed in front of “On Air”. A collection of videotapes of movies that were once broadcast on television is assembled in the background of a video in permanent playback of images of sandstorms, poetically addressing the artist’s long-term interests.

Throughout history, portraits have offered natural confrontation between the audience and viewer and raised essential questions about identity and message. Imai offers viewers a long passage of time through his self-portraits. “Portrait 0 to 20 Years Old” (1976) was Imai's first self-portrait and is a screen-printed image at age 30, superimposed on a series of portrait images on a surface glass panel. The works’ chronological arrangement allows the viewer to visually capture the path of time as it progresses from the past to the present. Imai gives the viewers an opportunity to recognise themselves among strangers while presenting a timeline of his own development. Photographs of his childhood with his grandmother, his first school uniform on the first day of school, young Imai in black-rimmed glasses, and many more, each moment of his life appears as an image of “I am just like any one of you”.

Imai continued to explore the limits and possibilities of digital media and its expression even after the dissolution of Gutai, and today holds a place as a pioneer of first of its kind, video art in Japan. Imai lived his young life amid the social changes from the postwar reconstruction period of Japan to its rapid economic growth and has continued to express the “time scape” of that era in his photographs and videos. However, he has always been interested in and has pursued the most commonplace scenes of everyday life, rather than choosing special and unusual subjects. According to Imai, “I find everything on earth a resource. Tangible things including wood, steel, and fabric, intangible things such as light, and air, as well as people, and social events all inspire me in my artwork.” His unique artistic style incorporates elements of everyday life and expresses the lived times with humor and rich sensitivity. This is the inheritance of the Gutai propounded by Jiro Yoshihara, who manifests “Do what no one has done before!”.