Meiro Koizumi in the Future Generation Art Prize is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: Meiro Koizumi rehearses the dawn of a suicide flyer.
(Photo by Lucy Hogg)
This is a moment from a video installation called “Portrait of a Young Samurai", by the Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi. I saw it a while back in Venice as part of the exhibition for the Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize, but I haven’t had a chance to Daily Pic it until now. (Click on the image to watch a video clip.) In the piece, Koizumi gets a young actor to rehearse a monologue that has a kamikaze pilot saying a final fairwell to his parents. Offscreen, we hear Koizumi pushing the rehearser to ever more extreme emotional states, and we watch as the young man attempts to nail an unthinkable part. As we see the professional actor try, and mostly fail, to break through all normal limits of thought and feeling, we wonder how so many thousands of Japanese men once did precisely that. There’s also something brilliantly chilling about Koizumi’s calm tone, as he coaches his actor to inhabit breakdown.
For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
See more of our coverage in your search results.
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.
Register below to read this article for free or subscribe
to unlock unlimited access to The Daily Beast.
Monthly
$1
First month then $5.99/month
Annual
$35
First year then $59.99/year
Premium
$79
First year then $119.99/year
*Substack access provided by the next business day, using your subscription email. Choosing the Premium plan constitutes your permission to share your subscription email with Substack and your agreement to Substack’s Privacy Policy.
Already have an account? Sign In
Looks like you already have a subscription!
You're all set!
Thanks for subscribing.