21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Throughout his career Harada Yuki (b. 1989) has dealt in artists and art forms such as Christian Riese Lassen, and ghost photography, which despite occupying a solid position in the visual culture of a particular era, languish on the margins of art history.
This solo outing will consist of a video installation incorporating “Waiting for,” Harada’s first new series in two years.
In 2017, Harada began collecting photos mainly picked up by junk removal contractors, and subsequently unwanted. 2019’s One Million Seeings shows the artist personally taking in his hand each one of these photos and examining it. This act of casting an eye over images that were once seen by someone, then abandoned, and which will eventually disappear from both memory and history, took a whole twenty-four hours.
Meanwhile, the work Waiting for, Harada’s latest offering and first in his “Waiting for” series, uses the CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology employed in the production of open world games to present “scenes from a million years ago/in the future.” In a world created entirely through artificial means, a voice recites the names of all the animals existing on Earth, in a work sure to summon up strong sensations of absence.
At first glance contrasting works, both One Million Seeings and Waiting for document humans engaging with vast amounts of information and attempting to incorporate it. The artist refers to this act as “Waiting.” The act of looking at something that once existed, and waiting for something that might visit, could be described as entrusting oneself to the temporal void between before and after an event. In an age when people pick up, and simultaneously let go, enormous volumes of information on a daily basis, “Waiting for” will offer one man’s approach to engaging with the world.

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