In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installations and interventional projects, Tanaka visualized and revealed the multiple contexts latent in the most simple of everyday acts. In his early object-oriented works, Tanaka experiments with ordinary objects to explore ways offering a possible escape from our everyday routine. Later in his works, Tanaka asking the participants to collectively navigate tasks that in and of themselves are out of the ordinary, he then documented behaviors that were unconsciously exhibited by people confronting unusual situations, such as one piece of pottery made by five potters and a piano played by five pianists simultaneously, seeking to reveal group dynamics in a micro-society and temporal community. Following the disaster on March 11, 2011 in Japan, Koki Tanaka has employed a variety of methods to produce works on the relationality that arises between human beings, there are what Tanaka calls “collective acts”: experiments of various sorts which still lack a fixed destination.

Bio authored by Hu Fang