TARO NASU is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Poklong Anading, “Sidereal Message”, starting from February 26, 2016.

Poklong Anading
Born in Manila in 1975. Now based in Philippines.
He studied under Roberto Chabet and graduated at the University of the Philippines in 1999.
A vast part of his projects is based on the notion of deductive research – collecting as an act, as a method to extract the essential but then portray the organic appropriateness of dissimilarity. The idea of continuity as a principle is manifested in Anading’s creative processes since most of his physicalized works are excerpts of these archives.

He participated in the Gwangju Biennale twice, in 2002 and 2012. He was invited to the Jakarta Biennale in 2009 and other famous Asian international exhibitions. In 2012 He was invited to contribute his work series “Anonymity“ to the exhibition “Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past” in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (California, USA) and works of the artists have been exhibited in the Zentrum fu¨r Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Germany) and the Yokahama Museum of Art(Japan).

In his first exhibition in TARO NASU, we will show his works that reflect on movements, interaction and systematic correlations in universal structures. Works from Anading’s “Counter Acts” series that have recently been included in the Roppongi Art Night will be exhibited with his ongoing video project “Every Water is an Island”.

With the term “liquid modernity” Zygmunt Bauman describes the contemporary society characterized by the constant mobility and changes in relationships, identities and global economies. In this “liquid modernity” – versus in modernity – that we live in now identity is, according to Bauman, no longer a “problem [of identity was] how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern problem of identity is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open.”

Anading’s ongoing series “Counter Acts” reveals the problem of identity and of photography.
This series is a collection of images of people, holding a circular mirror in front of their faces and reflecting the sunlight against the artist’s camera lens.
The gazes of artist and subjects as they attempt to regard one another are obscured, the sunlight that is directed toward the camera by the mirrors controverting both the act of observation and the act of photography.

The image is grainy and overexposed, its detail is, ironically, apparent in its shadows and darker areas. The anticipated process of illumination and revelation never occurs, the result speaking instead to concealment and the absence of knowledge.
By this aproach, He is building up utopic networks of strangers.
Anading constructs his “new societies” as an anonymous orchestra, whose harmony and sole common ground is the circular flash that, in the arrangement, perambulates from one image to the other like notes in the staffs.

“Every water is an island” is a collection of video recordings that Anading started during his residency at the Bangkok University Gallery in 2013.
The scenes in the work were focused on the flow of the water. The movement was in a diamond-like shaped frame with a glittery effect caused by the reflection of rays of light that the artist follows with the camera.
He creates this diamond shape with a manual gesture: forming a telescope with his hand and touching and prolonging the camera lens.
However, creating focus also implies the neglect of the periphery.
He deploys his hand like mindcuffs to the natural environments of the captured, and creates an image reminds the neglect.

In his newest project for TARO NASU, “Every Water is an Island” will be accompanied with an audio recording.
“Sidereus Nuncius” (Sidereal Message) is for the first time translated and read in Tagalog (Filipino) and will be integrated in the installation.

In 1610 Galileo Galilei wrote the “Sidereal Message” describing his observations of the moon and star constellations that were not viewable with the naked eye but visible through the zoom of the telescope.
What we see is water and light, in other words – two of the four – elements (earth, water, fire, air) that in Buddha’s teaching are to be understood as the base of all observation of real sensations, as categories of sensory experience.
Galileo Galilei dethroned this elements, replaced them with corporeal matter, and his chance to notice that was this “Sidereal Message”.
Anading must suggest the problem of recognition by observing the water and light, and may create our new method to see the world.