Q: Please introduce yourself.

A: I’m Aki Yahata, an artist. I mainly use photographs and videos to create art, which is based off of my own research. Also, it’s important to note as a bit of a background for this work, that after leaving art school, I studied medicine to help my vision of the kind of artist I wanted to become. Though I mainly work as an artist, I also work in the medical field. Though my work has a lot of different themes, one of them is “medicine as art.”


Q: What would you like visitors to pay attention to?

A: I hope that they’re able to see all the connections and intersects of the elements in the piece. This work consists of three road movies each depicting a different sightseeing trip around the liver, also known as “zang” in traditional Chinese medicine. It’s a part of the body held in high importance in Asian medicine as it helps chi, or energy, circulate the body. The first movie is a regular sightseeing trip around Kyoto. The second movie is a trip around the body, in other words Eastern medical treatment. The third movie is a psychological journey of the sightseeing trip, represented as lyrics.
I hope that the visitors will be able to feel the multilayered aspects while also feeling like they’ve slipped inside their own bodies.

Q: What brought you to make this work?

A: Working in the modern medical industry, I’ve really come to learn what our current limitations are. In particular, I’ve learned how Western medicine has limitations in dealing with chronic or unidentifiable symptoms. Through that, I’ve gained an appreciation for eastern medicine’s view of the human body. They believe that there are roads, meridians, in the human bodies, and I believed that these road movies were a way of showing this. Since road movies are a theme of artistic exploration for me, I came up with the idea of comparing a journey through the body with an actual geographical journey as a way of expanding that concept. Lastly, since the exhibition is being held at the Kyoto Hotel, I thought it was only natural to have the geographical journey be through Kyoto. (*1)

(*1) In this piece, Dr. Hajime Nakane (Meridian Karasuma) has provided a wide range of knowledge on Eastern medicine and has also greatly contributed to the sightseeing plan’s creation and execution.

Q: Is there anything you want to convey through your work?

A: The thing I wanted to convey most through my work was that the field of medicine is created by individuals. If you subscribe to Western medicine, you’ll treat your patients with Western techniques, but I think that the most effective way to practice medicine is to come up with something that makes sense to you. In order to do that, we need to be more flexible with how we view our bodies, and that will allow us to be more creative in our medical approach.(*2)Based on that point of view, I felt that Eastern medicine and art are in the same kind of position as Western medicine and modern society, so going off of that, I believe in “medicine as art.”

(*2) In this work, you are able to take a single journey in three different ways, but also experienced in three different ways simultaneously. It is meant to be a kind of case report or a simulation regarding the process of developing one's own medical skills and expanding one's strength to live.

Q: Was there anything you focused on in your work?

A: I’ve made a video showing the liver area with subtitles I created separately. I also tried to focus on my current theme of how we can practice art in our lives.

It encourages a space-expanding experience of the work beyond one's own body in the here and now, by letting the imagination run next to the lives of those walking through the live camera or, at this very moment, “sightseeing” in the liver, or zang, area.
Also, from an Eastern medicine perspective, there is a belief that people with “liver” can attune themselves to the place of the liver, which can help them to tune out the excesses of their body and mind, so we are also providing a real-time “liver” setting for the audience to tune in to.
Another is that, from an Eastern medical perspective, there is a belief that people watching the “liver” video can attune themselves to the place of the liver, thereby tuning out the excesses of the body and mind, so we are providing a setting for the audience to be in tune with their “liver” in real time.
I am also thinking about the “life of the image,” and I believe that this structure provides a clue to that.

Q: Could you speak a little more to the life in your videos and the connection between film and medicine?

A: Although I have not yet caught up with the verbalization, I think that at this point I can say that I am talking about “images possessed by a body or a human being. I have long had the sense that images can become life itself, especially when they are strongly integrated with our physical senses, such as camera shake.
This is the first time we have incorporated a live camera in this work, but images do not have life if they are simply streamed by a live camera. This is because the human body is not possessed. However, by layering human narration and subtitles on top of the live video, the live video acquires a certain physicality, and only through the action of the work as a whole, other than the subtitles, does the body and the way it is perceived on the live camera come into relief, bringing the audience and the video into synch, and the video becomes possessed by the body. I believe that this is the case. In this way, I believe that thinking about “what kind of images are possessed by the body” in an artistic context will lead us back to discovering and dissecting the human body, and I believe that we can find the connection and possibilities between art and medicine in this as well.

Aki Yahata
“Kyoto Sightseeing”
2024
Video Installation ｜Video with subtitles
(10mins.42sec)
Live Camera footage, pictures, etc.
Eastern medicine consultant: Hajime Nakane (Meridian Karasuma)
Traveler/Poet: Toma
Reference Material: A Tour of Kyoto with Yin, Yang, and the Five Elements (Hajime Nakane)

System Assistance: Daisuke Wakihara
Materials Assistance: Mitsuru Tokisato, Twelve.inc
Sightseeing Interpretation: Mika Nakamura