Artists

出品作家

The Vehicle

The Vehicle is a Japanese artist duo formed in 1996 by Takeshi Yoshida and Miki Kawahara. Their artworks are based on their slogan ‘Art begins at home,’ extracting views from everyday life and creating two-dimensional and three-dimensional works defying the boundaries of creative expression.

Recently they have been producing works concerning ‘cinematic images’ found in our daily life. In the ‘daily life,’ both the world of reality and that of movies and TV dramas are tangled up in people’s frame of mind. The Vehicles’ works make people aware of the boundary between the two worlds.

The Vehicle won Jury Prize in the 5th Art Business Audition at Great Art Festival with their work ‘Shirakaba – Electronic Appiance Storage Furniture in 1996 (Sony Music Entertainment). Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Motorama’ (1999), ‘In the family way’ (1999), ‘TOKIWORAMA’ at Anewal Gallery, Kyoto (2000), and ‘Story of their Life’ at Hillside Forum (2007). Selected group exhibition include 2006 Pusan Biennale, The Sea Art Festival ‘Living furniture’ (2006), ‘Osaka Art Kaleidoscope 2007’ at Osaka Contemporary Art Center, and ‘Japan Contemporary Art Festival’ at Heyli Art Village (South Korea).

The Vehicle Facebook

Works

The Vehicle works

I stood on this street for the first time in 8 years. The moment I got off the air-conditioned bus, I was showered with the memories of that summer day. ‘I used to beg my grandpa for chocolate ice pop at the old lady’s store. Gosh, that was so good.’

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Lambda Print

364x219mm（image size）

2019

Inquire Art Platform Tokyo

‘Blue Back Series’ is a series of photograph work featuring the background settings without any character from fictional scene in a movie.
Not only can the audience appreciate the blurred background scenery but can also be part of the work by taking selfie against it.
The two works in the exhibition are taken out of settings in Japanese animation. After deciding on place, time, season, and the rough storyline for the scene, we applied unique elements of background drawing, specific to animation illustration, onto the photograph that we actually took.
The extremely long title is either a partial monologue from the scene or a line from the scene.

Contrary to our society where globalization of information proliferates thanks to the advent of the internet, increasing number of Japanese animations base their stories on rural settings in local towns.
Animations in the 80’s and the 90’s featuring Tokyo or big megalopolitan cities, essentially forcasted the future, seem to be out of fashion these days.
In the freely expressive animation films, the story that takes place in a rural community, a closed and restrained society, evolves and transforms into rather expansive world where people can fly and town gets destroyed in some cases. We are interested in chasm between eurytopic and animation expression, which provides a conflicting relationship in the today’s globalizing information sphere.

Locale： 3rd Floor ⑪

‘Let me give you this chocolate. We may not see each other for a long time. You know, I was really happy to meet you.’