[Solo Exhibition] Tatzu Nishi “The Real Reason for Habits You Can’t Quit, and How to Deal with Them,” ANOMALY

Tatzu Nishi “The Real Reason for Habits You Can’t Quit, and How to Deal with Them”

I visited Tatzu Nishi’s first gallery solo show in 10 years, “The Real Reason for Habits You Can’t Quit, and How to Deal with Them.” The venue is the gallery ANOMALY at Tennoz Isle.

Tatzu Nishi has presented many large-scale projects: building rooms that swallow whole a city’s monuments or streetlights into installations, turning them into living rooms or hotels — and, if a hotel, actually “operating” it — dynamically defamiliarizing everyday scenery by shifting its context, and lightly overturning our fixed assumptions.

The work that gives the show its title, “The Real Reason for Habits You Can’t Quit, and How to Deal with Them,” is a piece in which an actually-used streetlight is stabbed into a car. A major work reaching about 4.5 m tall. It was reportedly made inside the gallery, and was actually for sale (US$1,100).

The price is relatively low, but with transport and installation costs, buying it would seem to carry a big hurdle.

The spacious gallery also displayed his aptly named “Tatsu-butsu” series — Buddhist figures carved into living trees. For collectors with a large garden or space, how about it…

I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of enormous works.
Many of them were reportedly made inside the gallery, partly due to transport issues.

Seeing a display on such a large scale, I felt freed from the very concept of collecting, and had the impression that the artist and the works were challenging me to a serious contest.