Installation view of " Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing presents a survey of Koki Tanaka’s practice over the past two decades with a particular focus on his works created since 2020. The spatial design of “Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community” centers around the theme and it invites visitors into a setting shaped by fleeting encounters and continual transformation. All the works are presented on minimalistic wooden structures instead of mounted on fixed walls, while chairs are scattered throughout the gallery, which can be freely moved by visitors. In this way, the exhibition encourages reflections on the connections formed between people by opening up possibilities for coexistence and solidarity. Through this openness and indeterminacy, the exhibition becomes a “provisional community”—one that is continually in formation, yet always at the verge of disintegration.
From Watch the Water Go Away (2006) near the entrance of the gallery to 10 Years (2025), a new commission by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, UCCA Curator Neil Zhang introduced that the exhibition focuses on how Tanaka explores the complex relationships between people through temporary gatherings and open-ended collaboration. While encounters initiated by chance, crisis, or workshops are often brief, the flow and tension of human emotion still emerge in flux.
Installation view of " Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
In his early work, the artist focused on the materiality of everyday items as a means of disrupting established cognitive frameworks. In 123456 (2003), a die continuously rolls and collides within a glass bottle in an endless loop of sound and image. This piece, through repetition and chance, constructs a non-linear viewing experience that transforms the seemingly trivial movements into a reflection of flow and uncertainty. Watch the Water Go Away (2006) captures the evaporation of water in near-still imagery. In this minimalist work, fleeting moments become the sole visual landscape, and time emerges as the primary medium. In Everything is Everything (2006), Tanaka and his assistants improvise with everyday objects on the street—brooms, rolls of paper, mattresses—liberating them from their intended uses to become both playful and subtly subversive agents that prompt viewers to reconsider relationships between things, between people and things, and between various objects themselves. These early experiments anticipate Tanaka’s later—and now current—engagement with collective dynamics, setting the stage for his ongoing exploration of human connection.
Koki Tanaka, 123456, 2003, single-channel video, color, sound, 4:3, 0'59". Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, Watch the Water Go Away, 2006, single-channel HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 0'26". Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, Everything is Everything, 2006, single-channel video, color, sound, 16:9, 6'04". Commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum for “2006 Taipei Biennial: dirty yoga.” Image courtesy the artist.
Since 2011, Tanaka has gradually shifted his artistic focus toward interpersonal connections, investigating how individual experiences circulate, collide, and dissolve within temporarily gathered groups through multi-participant workshops. He does not position himself as a “creator” in the conventional sense, but rather as a facilitator of a “moment”—setting the context and stepping back to observe as participants construct a provisional micro-society within an unpredictable, uncontrollable process.
Three representative works are presented in this exhibition, bringing forth multiple facets of this creative ethos. A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version) (2012/2025) transforms what was originally a solo act into a collaborative scenario requiring negotiation, adaptation, and mediation; A Poem Written by Five Poets at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version) 2013/2025 captures the tension between individual style and collective outcome within shared creative language; A Pottery Produced by Five Potters at Once (Silent Attempt) (re-edited version) (2013/2025) presents a gradual dissolution of individual consciousness within a collective focus in a group creation. Through these multi-participant settings, complex relational and psychological dynamics emerge layer by layer to produce a sense of disappearance along with renewal: when all involved share an objective, individual presence seems to vanish at certain moments to leave a purity in collective action in its wake.
Koki Tanaka, A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version), 2012/2025
Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 23'15". Commissioned by university Art Galleries, University of California, Irvine. Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, A Poem Written by Five Poets at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version), 2013/2025 Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 23'51". Commissioned by the Japan Foundation. Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, A Pottery Produced by Five Potters at Once (Silent Attempt) (re-edited version), 2013/2025 Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 21'10". Commissioned by the Japan Foundation. Created with Vitamin Creative space, Guangzhou, and the Pavilion, Beijing. Image courtesy the artist.
The “workshop” approach organized by Koki Tanaka involves relatively complex steps. This temporarily established community calls for the active participation of each contributor. The most notable example is Tag Game (2024): the artist first sets a theme, then he invites participants to co-create, and exchanges the stories they have written. These stories are drawn from each participant’s own life and memories. In the work, participants recite the words of other contributors, and they can almost equally feel the emotional resonance of moments in strangers’ lives. Based on this, the artist’s idea of “togetherness” as he says, also encompasses how to keep moving forward with those who have already left by recording the memories of them.
Koki Tanaka, Tag Game, 2024, single-channel 4K UHD video, color, sound, 16:9, 16'11". Commissioned by Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden For “The Air We Share” (2024-2025). Image courtesy the artist.
This approximately 16-minute video is not entirely about resonating or empathizing with the lives of others but also about the cognitive structures created through collaboration and the displacement of expression. This sometimes produces interesting contrasts. For example, when an older man reads a text about pregnancy experience, the curator regards this contrast as breaking conventional expectations of gender roles. It is precisely this contrast that provokes deeper reflection.
Koki Tanaka, Tag Game, 2024, single-channel 4K UHD video, color, sound, 16:9, 16'11".
Commissioned by Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden For “The Air We Share” (2024-2025). Image courtesy the artist.
In recent years, Tanaka’s moving image practice has increasingly turned toward broader social themes such as parenting and the lives of office workers. Reflective Notes (Reconfigured) (2021), adapted from his collection of essays, weaves together reorganized video archives and text to reflect on the fragility of human interdependence, as well as remind viewers that genuine change always begins in the subtle bonds between individuals and communities. Mobility and Extinction (2024) intertwines personal experience with public debate, drawing on interdisciplinary dialogue to prompt reflection on how, in a world of constant change and volatility, new forms of coexistence might be found across borders and species. In a work examining gender roles, divisions of domestic labor, and workplace power dynamics, Acting is Sharing Something Personal (2025) brings light to the challenges individuals face when confronting questions of identity and divergent values. The most recent creation featured in this exhibition, 10 Years (2025) is a commission by UCCA that brings together several narrators who had previously participated in his projects. Through their accounts of personal memories and social events, the work traces the crosscurrents of private lives and public history over the past decade.
Koki Tanaka, Reflective Notes (Reconfiguration), 2021, single-channel HD video, color, sound, 16:9, 6'31".
The film was made for “Returning” (2021) at the Sydney Opera House, with support from the Japan Foundation, Sydney. Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, Mobility and Extinction, 2024
Single-channel 4K UHD video, color, sound, 16:9, 59'53". Commissioned by the European Union. Image courtesy the artist.
Koki Tanaka, Acting is Sharing Something Personal, 2025Single-channel 4K UHD video, color, sound, 2.35:1, 19'56". The film was collaboratively created with Yurakucho Art Urbanism YAU. Image courtesy the artist.
“Togetherness—the harmonious coexistence and symbiotic relationship among people,” as Koki Tanaka stated at the opening, is a major core theme of this exhibition. In this temporarily symbiotic relationship, Tanaka acts not just as a creator, but a facilitator of a “moment”—setting the context and stepping back to observe, allowing participants to collectively construct a temporary community in a process that is beyond control and difficult to predict.
Installation view of " Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
With a simple yet timely vision reflecting the current era, Koki Tanaka hopes to present a mode of living in symbiosis, including how people live together, work together, and interact with one another. This has become one of the overarching themes of the exhibition. Currently, each of us seems to live with a relatively fragmented and dispersed state, while collaboration and symbiosis become more important. In “Provisional Community”, visitors may enter a site that continuously changes due to brief encounters, which encourages them to rethink how people establish connections with one another, and from this, to further imagine another possibility for coexistence and solidarity. The exhibition remains on view till January 4, 2026.
Installation view of " Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
About the Exhibition
Dates: 2025.9.27 – 2026.1.4
Venue: UCCA Beijing West, New, Central Galleries
Courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
