Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Doug Aitken: new ocean (short version)

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Doug Aitken: new ocean (short version)

by John McGee

Doug Aitken, new ocean floor, 2001, video installation
(Image courtesy the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, presented in association with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist, the Serpentine Gallery, London, 303 Gallery, New York, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zurich. ©Stephen White)

Video artist, photographer, music video director—take your pick. Doug Aitken, 34, has done them all. And in new ocean, an installation of multi-screen video projections and one huge light box photograph, he puts them together. 

Water stars in half of the stylish video music boxes. Glaciers track across three-part screens. Ice cracks in short, rhythmic clips. Thundering waterfalls kaleidoscope in on themselves around a 360-degree panorama of screens.

In other videos, people traipse through empty urban and rural scenes, then fall into black emptiness. Many visitors will feel likewise. Most of them zone out in this dark, moody, night club chill-out room of an exhibition.

The Doug Aitken: new ocean exhibition was held Oct-Nov 2002 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo.

©2006 John McGee

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