Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
September 27, 2025 - January 4, 2026
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community,” a solo exhibition by the Japanese contemporary artist. The exhibition surveys over twenty years of Koki Tanaka’s (b. 1975, Tochigi, Japan) practice, featuring more than ten artworks, including early video projects, and presenting for the first time a new commission by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition focuses on how Tanaka explores the complex relationships between people through temporary gatherings and open-ended collaboration. While encounters initiated by chance, crisis, or workshops are often brief, the flow and tension of human emotion still emerge in flux. Rather than providing definite answers, “Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community” creates situations that allow visitors to experience a “provisional” coexistence with one another in orchestrated situational settings. This exhibition is curated by UCCA Curator Neil Zhang.
Koki Tanaka’s practice has evolved from an initial focus on the relationship between objects, to the interactions between people and objects, and ultimately to connections between people. His works across video, photography, site-specific installations, and thematic workshops capture everyday behaviors, objects, and ideas often overlooked or forgotten. These elements, through chance encounters or the removal of intended function, reveal hidden meanings and tensions. In Tanaka’s work, ordinary objects and actions act as catalysts rather than passive subjects of observation.
In his early work, the artist focused on the materiality of everyday items as a means of disrupting established cognitive frameworks. In 123456 (2003), a die continuously rolls and collides within a glass bottle in an endless loop of sound and image. This piece, through repetition and chance, constructs a non-linear viewing experience that transforms the seemingly trivial movements into a reflection of flow and uncertainty. Watch the Water Go Away (2006) captures the evaporation of water in near-still imagery. In this minimalist work, fleeting moments become the sole visual landscape, and time emerges as the primary medium. In Everything is Everything (2006), Tanaka and his assistants improvise with everyday objects on the street—brooms, rolls of paper, mattresses—liberating them from their intended uses to become both playful and subtly subversive agents that prompt viewers to reconsider relationships between things, between people and things, and between various objects themselves. These early experiments anticipate Tanaka’s later—and now current—engagement with collective dynamics, setting the stage for his ongoing exploration of human connection.
Since 2011, Koki Tanaka has gradually shifted his artistic focus toward interpersonal connections, investigating how individual experiences circulate, collide, and dissolve within temporarily gathered groups through multi-participant workshops. He does not position himself as a “creator” in the conventional sense, but rather as a facilitator of a “moment”—setting the context and stepping back to observe as participants construct a provisional micro-society within an unpredictable, uncontrollable process.
Three representative works are presented in this exhibition, bringing forth multiple facets of this creative ethos. A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version) (2012/2025) transforms what was originally a solo act into a collaborative scenario requiring negotiation, adaptation, and mediation; A Poem Written by Five Poets at Once (First Attempt) (re-edited version) 2013/2025 captures the tension between individual style and collective outcome within shared creative language; A Pottery Produced by Five Potters at Once (Silent Attempt) (re-edited version) (2013/2025) presents a gradual dissolution of individual consciousness within a collective focus in a group creation. Through these multi-participant settings, complex relational and psychological dynamics emerge layer by layer to produce a sense of disappearance along with renewal: when all involved share an objective, individual presence seems to vanish at certain moments to leave a purity in collective action in its wake.
In recent years, Tanaka’s moving image practice has increasingly turned toward broader social themes such as parenting and the lives of office workers. Reflective Notes (Reconfigured) (2021), adapted from his collection of essays, weaves together reorganized video archives and text to reflect on the fragility of human interdependence, as well as remind viewers that genuine change always begins in the subtle bonds between individuals and communities. Mobility and Extinction (2024) intertwines personal experience with public debate, drawing on interdisciplinary dialogue to prompt reflection on how, in a world of constant change and volatility, new forms of coexistence might be found across borders and species. In a work examining gender roles, divisions of domestic labor, and workplace power dynamics, Acting is Sharing Something Personal (2025) brings light to the challenges individuals face when confronting questions of identity and divergent values. The most recent creation featured in this exhibition, 10 Years (2025) is a commission by UCCA that brings together several narrators who had previously participated in his projects. Through their accounts of personal memories and social events, the work traces the crosscurrents of private lives and public history over the past decade.
The exhibition’s spatial design also continues the theme of “Provisional Community”: works are presented on minimalistic wooden structures instead of mounted on fixed walls, while chairs are scattered throughout the gallery can be freely moved by visitors. This opens opportunities for viewers to shift their vantage points at will—whether in gatherings or solitude. Through this openness and indeterminacy, “Koki Tanaka: Provisional Community” the exhibition becomes a “provisional community”—one that is continually in formation, yet always at the verge of disintegration.
Artist Koki Tanaka
Koki Tanaka (b. 1975, Tochigi, Japan; lives and works in Kyoto) graduated from Tokyo Zokei University (BFA) in 2000 and Tokyo University of the Arts (MFA) in 2005. His major solo exhibitions include “Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie)” (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020); “Precarious Tasks” (Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2019); “Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie)” (Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, 2018); “Provisional Studies (Working Title)” (Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, 2017); “Potters and Poets” (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2016); “Possibilities for being together. Their praxis.” (Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art Gallery, Mito-shi, Ibaraki, 2015); “A Vulnerable Narrator” (Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2015); “Abstract Speaking – Sharing Uncertainty and Collective Acts” (Japan Pavilion, the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013). His work has also been shown extensively in group exhibitions and biennales including “Antibodies” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2021); “Though it’s dark, still I sing” (Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2021); “Every Step in the Right Direction” (Singapore Biennale, Singapore, 2019); “Taming Y/Our Passion” (Aichi Triennale, Aichi, Japan, 2019); “Action!” (Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, 2017); “Viva Arte Viva” (the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017); “Trace of Existence” (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2016); “Mobile M+: Moving Images” (M+, Hong Kong, 2015). His work is held in the collections of institutions including M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands.
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100016
