“A Certain Collector B” Yosuke Bandai 万代洋輔
A Certain Collector B
Yosuke Bandai 万代洋輔
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257mm x 184mm
Offset Print
Hardcover
62 pages
Attach print to page mount
Design : Takashi Tsukahara
Printing : Shumpousha.,Co.Ltd.
Binding : Eikudo.,Co.Ltd.
Supported by TARO NASU
Edition of 300
2017
*This book was bound by skilled craftsmen. It is seen some of the quality differences in each one book. Please note.
*職人による手製本のため、一冊ごとのクオリティに多少のバラつきがあります。ご了承ください。
Born in 1980, Yosuke Bandai is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in photography. Highly active since 2000, his work has been featured widely in both group and solo exhibitions. Notable recent solo shows include: “Friday, September 9 – Friday, October 7, 2016” (TARO NASU, Tokyo 2016), “Passing Man” (CAPSULE, Tokyo 2015), and “I trust only the rib, after all, you know?” (TARO NASU, Tokyo 2014).
Bandai’s “the lid on the hole” (2016) is a well-known series in his oeuvre, and consists of photographs of items in various states of decay that have been reassembled into sculptural objects as an expression of his unique sensitivities. For the series, Bandai traveled to forests and other desolate sites far from the city’s prying eyes, where he spent the night cobbling together illegally-dumped refuse. His photographs depicting waste material reborn in the morning light suggest an indifferent humor in the face of his creations’ foreboding loneliness.
A Certain Collector B is Bandai’s first publication. The volume is a repository of his ongoing project that collects wayfaring material found strewn on the street-sides, reassembled into objects photographed on a flatbed scanner. These images – some of which curiously contain the carcasses of once-living creatures – are uniquely devoid of depth and scale when illuminated under the scanner’s penetrating light, seemingly transfigured into a new breed of materiality, weightless as if floating on a 3DCG modelling screen.
The publication’s design takes a cue from the physical works in A Certain Collector B, and can be understood as an amalgamation of constituent parts. The front and inside covers have disparate coloration, and the cheesecloth which conventionally preserves a book’s structural integrity is instead baldly exposed. Moreover, the prints have been tipped-in by hand, fulfilling the concept that the volume is the private album of a fictive collector known only as “B.” A thorough feast for the senses, A Certain Collector B is simultaneously a first tome that embodies Bandai’s sense of balance as the omniscient artist with a bird’s eye awareness of his own process.
万代洋輔は1980年生まれの写真を主に扱う美術家です。これまで「”Friday, September 9 – Friday, October 7, 2016″」(TARO NASU、東京、2016年)、「通行人間」(CAPSULE、東京、2015年)、「あばら骨しか信頼してないじゃないですか俺」(TARO NASU、東京、2014年)をはじめ、多くの個展を開催、グループ展に参加するなど、2000年代より積極的な活動を行っています。
万代の作品は朽ち果てた物を独自の感性で再構築し、写真に収めた『蓋の穴』シリーズがよく知られています。人里離れた森などで不法投棄された物たちを一晩かけて組み上げ、朝の光でカメラに収めたこの作品は、その対象物の持つ不穏さや行為の孤独さとは裏腹に、どこかあっけらかんとしたユーモアを漂わせています。
初の出版物となる今作『A Certain Collector B』は、近年万代が取り組んでいる、道端に落ちている物を蒐集し、フラットベッドスキャナーの上で再構成したイメージ群で構成されています。時に生物の死骸をも含むこれらのイメージは、スキャナーの発する光に照らされ奥行きなどのスケール感を失う代わりに、3DCGのモデリング画面のような浮遊感を伴った、新しい物質へと再生しているように見えます。
本書は’A Certain Collector B’の作品と同様に、書籍を部材による構成物と捉えてデザインしています。表紙や見返しなどに違う色味を配し、書籍の強度を保つための寒冷紗をあえて露呈させ、本文にはプリントを手貼りするといった過程を経て、架空の蒐集家”B”のアルバムというコンセプトに至りました。極めて感覚的でありながら、同時に自身の行為を俯瞰して見る万代のバランス感覚を体現する一冊となっています。