Cavity (Kū)
The hollow interior of the body. The insides. The body. The inner self.

“During the creative process, a dialogue took place with a certain person.
While rearranging objects prepared for this dialogue, a form unexpectedly emerged that evoked my own image.
This event prompted a shift towards a decalcomania-like process: scanning previously shot negatives and repeatedly inverting and transferring them.

The negatives used were a continuous sequence of shots capturing how light from car headlights and street lamps reflected and shifted within a stainless steel depression beside a nighttime sidewalk.
That hollow, which returned an image when it received light, entered into correspondence with what might be called an internal bodily cavity, becoming a catalyst for the generation and transformation of images.

As the process repeated, a dialogue emerged between left and right, and the image rose up, resonating with memory.

The images thus generated were shared with a painter; I myself did not paint, but relied on the presence that emerged in words and in-between spaces, allowing the work to transition into painting.”
—Yosuke Bandai

An image takes shape before one’s eyes. It is at once an object that truly exists and a being that may be called an image without physical substance. In Yosuke Bandai’s perceptual world, images appear with a conviction akin to resignation: they are constantly transformed by external conditions and by the subjectivity of the viewer. Since the early stages of his career, Bandai has consistently pursued the truths that emerge through substituting one thing for another.

Whether infiltrating the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mount Fuji and photographing piles of discarded trash presented as “sculptures”; placing found objects directly onto a scanner to “photograph” them, thereby eliminating the mediation of the camera as “eye”; or creating “digital images as photographs” that attempt to mimic painting—throughout his body of work, the potential of substitution forms a central and recurring theme.

For Bandai, the dissonance or gap between the image presented by the object before one’s eyes and the sensation that arises within oneself while viewing it constitutes the driving force behind his practice. The relationship generated between image and viewer is never fixed or completed; rather, it is a sustained and reciprocal act of cognition. If so, for him, are painting and photography merely alluring residues that trigger this ever-changing complicity, or are they empty vessels designed to contain images externalized as events?

Yosuke Bandai
Born in Tokyo in 1980, currently based in Tokyo.
Major exhibitions include: “digitus” (TARO NASU) in 2021, “Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexions” (Mori Art Museum), “FOTO / INDUSTRIA” (International Museum and Library of Music) in 2019, “APMoA Project, ARCH: Digitize memory with 5” (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art) in 2017, “Friday, September 9 – Friday, October 7, 2016” (TARO NASU) in 2016, “Tsūkō ningen” (CAPSLE) in 2015, “I trust only the rib, after all, you know?” (TARO NASU) in 2014, “Disordered Bandai; His Unequalled Passion” (AI KOWADA GALLEY) in 2012, “RADICON” (hiromiyoshii) in 2009, and more.