Tsuneo Nakai

Tsuneo Nakai was born in Osaka in 1947. As a student at Tokyo University of the Arts he made his first work The Skin of a Napping (1967), which was selected for the Sogetsu Experimental Film Festival organized by the Sogetsu Art Center. His second film, Paludes (1968) won an Encouragement Prize at Film Art Festival 1968 Tokyo, organized by Film Art-sha that year as a successor to the Sogetsu Experimental Film Festival. In 1971 he presented an installation incorporating fire at Gallery Tamura (Tokyo), and produced Alchemy (1971), inspired by the structural film movement. Alchemy and Azoth were screened at the experimental film festival EXPRMNTL 5 held at Knokke-le-Zoute (Knokke-Heist, Belgium) in 1974, and Alchemy won the Prix Baron Lambert. In the late 1970s he began creating video art, and obtained backing from JVC to produce the video piece Artificial Paradise (1983), which was later screened at Documenta 8. In 1983 he joined forces with Video Cocktail, a group of young video artists, and organized exhibitions at galleries and museums. In 1986 he became Assistant Professor of Conceptual Design at Kyoto City University of Arts. Since then the focus of his practice has been video installations and video objects such as New World (1986), and works exhibited from 2000 onward include Tokyo Atomic Bomb (2009) and Ilinx (2011).