YAMBARU ART FESTIVAL
2023-2024

ART PROGRAM

I messed up

The banyan tree, an iconic tree of Okinawa and transplanted at the time of the Okuma Beach Hotel's founding, is present in the hotel's rows of cottages that resemble the American West Coast.
When I first visited this hotel, I had a sense of mixing the scenery of the U.S. West Coast and Yanbaru, and later learned that the hotel was built on the former site of the Voice of America (the U.S. military broadcasting base in the Far East).
In 1978, the year the hotel opened, the first Superman movie, a symbol of American comic book heroes, was released in the United States.
At the time, American comic book heroes and other American dramas and animations were often broadcast on Japanese television, and he liked to watch them. He created a humorous sculpture of a fictional superhero who jumped through time and space as his memories of the times and the present intersected, and while on patrol from the sky, he tried to land on Okuma Beach but failed and got stuck in a banyan tree and was in trouble.
The fictional superhero is a human dummy who protects people from danger and accidents, and somehow he is active as a crash test dummy with a bland expression in a harsh experiment (mission), but he has a body like an American comic superhero, but also a sense of sadness and grief.

PROFILE

Hideo Nagai

PROFILE

He has created works with an overwhelming presence and a sense of humor that opens the viewer's mind, such as "BABA PROJECT" (2001), a large sculpture that deforms the existence of the subject based on the resistance of invisible forces and his own identity, and "B-PROJECT: Throw at the Navel" (2011). Since then, he has created "Endorphin" (2016), an installation work based on the theme of morphine secreted in the brain by fumigating 150 self-made crutches, and "Time 21106" (2020), a painting work expressing time, simultaneity, and memory/record. Major exhibitions include CAFE in Mito 2004 at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Osaka Canvas Project 2010 at Sakishima Government Building, Kyoto International Film Festival 2016 at Kyoto City Hall Square, and many other solo and group exhibitions. In addition, he received the Incentive Award at Kirin Art Award in 2002.