The art of Taro Shinoda engages themes of science, philosophy, and desire, and investigates our place in the universe. During his month-long residency in Boston in the spring of 2007, Shinoda was inspired by the moonlight in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum courtyard to develop his Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique. The seed for the project was rooted in the artist’s early childhood memories of trying to communicate with his mother over great distances, entrusting messages to the moon, which he hoped his mother could receive on the other side of the planet when the moon rose for her.
Taro Shinoda returns to the Gardner Museum this fall to present “Taro Shinoda: Lunar Reflections,” a new body of work. The exhibition will include film shots from Tokyo, Istanbul, and Limerick, in addition to Boston, a sound installation, and an engawa—a Japanese viewing platform that traditionally separates the domestic space from the garden. From this vantage point, visitors may sit and meditate on their place in the universe as they watch Shinoda’s extraordinary films of the moon and mysterious night landscapes.
For this project, Shinoda constructed an astronomical telescope out of corrugated cardboard and attached a video camera to it; with this instrument he films the moon and cityscapesfrom different parts of the world. He describes his endeavor as “the first step toward having a sense of us all sharing this planet together… I look at the moon and, a few hours later, you look at it in some different country… Observing the way the moon travels allows me to make an image of the whole world.”
Taro Shinoda (b. 1964) is a Japanese conceptual artist whose work, often linked to landscapes, engages themes of desire, meditation, and adaptation. A self-taught artist whose broad base of knowledge and interest encompasses natural sciences, engineering, architecture, and landscaping, Shinoda conjures machines that not only approximate nature but create whole microcosmoses in and around themselves. Elements of the traditional Japanese garden is a recurring theme in Shinoda’s work and stems from a lifelong interest and training in Japanese horticulture.
Shinoda’s work has been shown in: Korea at the Busan Biennale; Turkey at the Istanbul Biennial; Limerick, Ireland at the EV+A festival; Los Angeles at the Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theater; Tokyo at the Mori Art Museum; San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Lithuania at the Baltic Triennale; and Yokohama, Japan, at the International Triennale of Contemporary Art. Shinoda has been an artist-in-residence at REDCAT, Los Angeles and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Shinoda was born in Tokyo, where he continues to live and work.
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