A real-time, online game-like video installation that changes as it unfolds. Visitors can participate and experience it through their own smartphones or tablets installed in the exhibition space. By answering psychological test-like questions presented in the dedicated app, they can create “their own face.” By uploading that face, they can add “their own face” to the planet within the work. The planet is composed of nine faces, and as they respond to one another, they continue to generate a wide range of dramas. Like human beings, the lively faces on the planet speak of everything from the mundane to the lofty, laugh, cry, affirm each other’s existence, and, however briefly, clearly show that they once existed on this “Planet of Faces.”

A work that depicts a romance between humans and technology as a performance installation. Humans and technology (a skin-colored gorilla) attempt to become one through “skin garments.” Technology turns its thoughts to the finite twilight that humans possess, while humans gaze toward the infinite galaxy that technology possesses. Whether they are embracing each other or restraining each other, both are drowning in a sea of intimate distance. Humans are addicted to technology, and at the same time, technology is also addicted to humans. While loving technology, how can we also love humans? By finding an intermediate zone between pleasure and despair, I want to project it onto the sexuality of us humans living in the present.

In this work, the viewer sequentially inhabits various characters (avatars) living in a room within a spacious apartment building, inside a virtual space. The person playing music, the person watering flowers, and the people having conversations do not interact with one another, as if each were living in a separate reality. Experiencing the reality of each character (avatar), who inhabit the same space yet never cross paths, through VR is frustrating because you cannot control the avatars’ movements, while at the same time it feels intensely real. In the end, there is a twist in which you are possessed by another avatar, reminding you that you are not always the center of the world, and that you too are someone else’s other.

In this work, the VR participant is exhibited in the venue as a “sculptural work.” The viewer wears a VR headset and a full set of VR walking apparatus (Virtuix Omni) mounted on a pedestal, and experiences the work while holding a gun-shaped controller. This shooting-game-style piece allows the viewer to shoot a gun to gradually open up their field of vision and acquire the scenery before them. Toward the end of the experience, a treasure chest appears deep inside the museum; when it is opened, the Medusa painted by Caravaggio leaps out. The viewer, gazed upon by Medusa, is turned into a stone statue, and the experience ends with them displayed on a pedestal as one of the museum’s exhibits. This work does not merely invite participation in a game, but turns the very situation of viewing a VR work into the work itself.

An exhibition created with inspiration from manga artist Daijiro Morohoshi’s “Kaokaosama ga Toru.” From questions about the boundary between the self and the world, and how others perceive the existence of someone other than themselves, the exhibition brought together works that express, in various forms, the skin that can be seen by others as the very identity of that existence. It is an installation in which a video showing diverse skins layering over an object molded from the artist’s own face like a liquid, a sculpture in which the upper and lower halves of a torso are separated and face one another, a novel about an imaginary sister, and a performance by the artist are all merged into one. These ideas stem from a reactive obsession with skin and the body that arose while the pandemic had yet to come to an end.

A performance work created as an homage to the wildly popular 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Created amid the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, this work emerged from the concern that “the real and the virtual will never fully replace each other” within Japanese society, where virtual communication has become commonplace. Audiences can engage with the piece from anywhere using their own smartphones or computers. Actions taken by the audience through the game screen determine the behavior of performer Yamauchi himself in the exhibition space. At the venue, viewers can see the living, breathing Yamauchi following commands such as “Eat a banana” and “Carry the box,” or sometimes refusing them. In the game, Yamauchi’s avatar moves according to the instructions of the real Yamauchi. Yet while the online avatar remains cheerful and relaxed throughout, the actual Yamauchi becomes exhausted and expressionless as he overuses his own body. This gap makes the difference between the virtual and the real strongly felt.