Curator Koichiro Osaka’s review of EUGENE STUDIO’s solo exhibition 1/2 Century later. at Shiseido Gallery, titled “Half a Century Since 1968, Presented by a ‘Purposeful Provocateur,’” has been published on the Bijutsu Techo website.
Curator Koichiro Osaka’s review of EUGENE Studio’s solo exhibition “THE EUGENE Studio 1/2 Century later.” at Shiseido Gallery, titled “Half a Century Since 1968, Presented by a ‘Purposeful Provocateur,’” has been published on the Bijutsu Techo website.
We invite you to read the full article.
Excerpt from the Original Article (Machine Translation from Japanese)
Half a Century Since 1968, Presented by a “Purposeful Provocateur”
“THE EUGENE Studio 1/2 Century later.”
Taking “from destruction to regeneration” as its theme, THE EUGENE Studio presents a solo exhibition centered on “1/2 Century later.”—the half-century between 1968 and the present, or the half-century yet to come. Curator Koichiro Osaka reviews the exhibition, which presents new works centered on a large-scale installation.
1968—the year of the Prague Spring, antiwar movements against the Vietnam War, the May revolution in Paris, and intensifying student movements at universities across Japan, including the University of Tokyo and Nihon University, as challenges to established systems arose around the world.
In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), media historian Fred Turner analyzes how the reverberations of the counterculture advanced by Stewart Brand and others in the 1960s, with its demand for access to knowledge, contributed to the popularization of the web and influenced the products developed in Silicon Valley and the increasing informatization of society. What vision of the future should we pursue? What forms of technological development are needed to bring such a society into being?
These fundamental questions of vision were posed anew amid the expanding possibilities created by technological progress, bringing about dramatic change. …
