Li Zhenhua an independent curator from China and one of three curators that gave this show its arms and legs tells in the catalogue, among many other interesting things, just how the title of the exhibition came about. "0ut the Window, describes the moment of looking out at the window. The view close up is limited, but if one looks farther you can see more of the sky over the ocean. Wind blows in through the window; light enters through the window; and it is an opening for us to see each other."
Ou Ning's 40-minute black+white 'San Yuanli' would aptly convey one aspect of window to which Li Zhenhua talks about. 'San Yuanji' has just about every graphic angle cut to cut so that nook to cranny soars past specificity. The terrain of high-rise--economic thrust and colonization, the swoops down on life in the crags close to the earth, life as survival economy, economy as relationship, economy everywhere--emptiness, narrow spaces, endurance, bleakness, advancement and decay, and of course--light, wind, success, to see it all. A continual wave at harassing fast pace blows and catches the between--this is how it is recorded and how it is seen. This is the window from which a fresh gust of wind might be felt. This is one more story told with the camera, one that we re-record as direct experience, again with the eye, forty minutes, via multi-angled vigilance, defiance, singularity, and deep camaraderie. This is but one wind.

Less a window than a surface suspended in space projected heads demand the tolerance of time. Li Yongbin started out as a painter painting, he says, just for a dead friend. Strange doing this for those who are already gone, but then again many things are gone and you still get around somehow to seeing them. I wasn't able to spend the time needed to see the painterly face pack incrementally up to a death mask. But it was quite pleasurable standing up close watching another almost lifeless face tell-tail life through the quietness of time, and figured if you were there at the right time and if you looked you'd see the mask. I guess it just was not my time.
Speeds charge in Yu Hyoungjun's computer graphic animation, 'Who am I?' and 'Distortion'. 'Who am I' is a silver to dark kaleidoscope of human male muscle and acrobatic performance, fading in and out. While the delicacy of the animation can be felt the overriding feeling is one of conflict and battle. If the male image sends brutal shivers down your spine, and you're not one for physical conflicts, 'Distortion' will quench the desire to leave this one. While 'Who am I' is kaleidoscopic, 'Distortion' is beautifully processional. Here the fineness of the gray and silver shadowy light travelling across two moderate sized screens draw all the fleetingness of a feminine grace, so much so that you want to touch, though impossible, it's only an animation, female torso butterflies off, only to return later to the same surface.

Tinkling! There was a tinkling noise and couldn't get it out of my head, repetitious, not racing, not at all unpleasant--the sound of ritual perhaps. I didn't see anything but could feel a breeze.

The body and its movement traces altogether differently in an installation of photocopies, printouts, and torn from publication pages, a slide projection, and video piece. There is a table with bits and pieces on it work related things scattered over. The title of the installation 'Study of Portuguese Man-of War' and the passing at first glance this piece really didn't do much for me. I watched the video for a while, then the slides, looked around on the wall, and the common thread, either animated or just as absence, was a figure, sometimes masked out, so that all you could see is white, other images look pretty untouched. The shapes, animated bodies all frozen into still life, stars, singers--America-pop idolatry--western antiquity, powerful leaders and politicians, are all raising a hand. There were takes of Elvis, Fred Astair, Hitler, Michelangelo sculpture, prima ballerina, arts, science, victorious, posing, postulating, promotional, riffing and gyrating, stretching the body to gravity-defying heights and lengths, one way or another, raising a hand. The impressions started to build, and I started to get the craft that was in play. I'm not sure I necessary agree with what I felt was being offered, but will give it that I was glad I didn't move away too quickly with false judgement in search of the source of that tinkling seam.

I started thinking too that this exhibition was not so much a take on new media and technology, at least in part, and something more to do with how technology is able to store, retrieve, manipulate, loop, and load an image out of its context defiant of time as an attempt to re-communicate. This seems to be the one of the threads Sumitomo Fumihiko, the Japanese curator wishes to pursue. Sumitomo in the catalogue considers the open source of new technology with its ability, he says, according to Lev Manovic, "for disturbing the existing order of society". When we label a photograph, or know its author particular knowledge and power is reinforced. We not only gather its meaning but also understand its place in a hierarchy. If we refrain from this labeling, and when we steal from the author or source, and place information in limbo, value, status, also order, can confuse. As images and information are projected onto new fields they open different states of possibility, at the same time can produce other nerve-racking dilemmas.

Pol Mol's lower media loops are more physical and traditional though still circulate within a state of anticipation full of disturbance. A text reads of foiled plans to offer coffee. There is a display top where empty coffee cups sit around handfuls of black button badges with white text, some text stolen, one pertaining to the shared frustrations of Tokyo commuter transport system which favors almost exclusively day business and is quite dysfunctional in twilight leisure. Pol Mol offers a kind of light pay to the nerves and senses even if each part doesn't make neat perfect sense, there are enough retrieval systems in operation, you are welcome to use them and fill in. There is an offer to take as many badges as you like and redistribute them into different locations. Loops pile as old car tires loosely placed one cobbling over another. A black gunmetal circular structure reflects a single light drained of its specifics and takes on the look of a fuzzy moon. A box room structure, of which one outer wall supports the circular metal structure, internally supports three bands of flat color painted around the internal walls of the room. Again only one light is deployed this time to highlight just part of the loop. There are no windows here just a door and a surface.

The tinkling sound was getting stronger again. This time I find the source. A small monitor set to the floor just a step up runs another loop. A stationary glass tumbler holds a plastic die tumbling around the inner confines of the glass, and this was producing the distinctive sound. After a while, speed, and trance, and tinkle, started to fill in the gaps.
This lightness of play, offering 'ins' to mindless depths, gave the second wind and a much-needed break from some of the more heady issues working out and around. Tanaka Kiki is equally comfortable working with digital or analog. And what Tanaka is most successful in doing is breaking the flow of information long enough to entrance via another signal--digital loops, repetitive tasking, setting a moment up without a beginning or end-- reveals a different conduit for another kind of information to circuit.

Behind a black curtain the color yellow lights photo-clad sculpture print by print redeveloping the skin of something quite physical -- a roller blader, an orchid, and a rock--outdoorsy stuff. These pieces look painfully time-consuming to make and I must admit I was having trouble figuring out why Gwon Osang went to all the trouble.
Later I took the trouble to read the third Curator, from Korea, Suh Jinsuk's 'Confusion and Freedom' introduction in the catalogue. It helped make sense of Gwon Osang's weird fetish for reproduction. Suh Jinsuk talks about an in-between generation--a generation that grew up with parents of the non-digital age. Much of their early child-hood was spent taking part in tradition rituals of playing outside; going for trips, touching physical things, and only when they were older did they touch the digital and the Internet. Their information comes two ways: one hooks back into tradition and a very much physical way of life, the other speeds the inter-ways of virtual life. A generation later, those born during and after eighties, Suh Jinsuk says, are completely comfortable with virtual life. Sitting in front of the computer screen for them is to be relaxed. The Korean artists in this exhibition are the in-betweens, and have not reconciled a place where they can feel comfortable and are apt to dart back and forth through media surfaces, sometimes craving analog touch at the same time being digitally conversant.
A third wind of anxiety comes with realization.

Kim Changkyum had 'Letter' and 'Sarubia Coffee Shop', two video installations that changed the color of expectation. Walking into 'Letter' I first noticed one of those replica, you know, domed glass clocks, a can of drink change from one brand to another, a framed photo that also changed, and a person's writing hand and head whispering as the hand wrote characters and lines, the spinning gizmos of the glass clock telling the time. 'I wanted to write to you for a long long time'. I felt like I was intruding into someone's private world, but didn't care. I was fascinated. I came in at the tale end of the projection, so not long after entering this wonderfully secure place intimacy stopped. All that was left were white plaster castes, and a white cloth. The photocopied typed letter was there on the wall, in Japanese and English but that wasn't real anymore. The projection started up again, and while this was all clever, knowing the actual images were just projected dupes, I went in again and this time was caught between the bald reality and the manipulating visual poetics. I lived through it. 'Sarubia Coffee Shop' projected a similar quandary; one of technological image manipulation, the other the desire to retreat back into some past. Saruba was successful though more complex both in its visual syntax and conceit. I think I stood and watched this three times completely over.

But this is not the end...

I went in first with Ou Ning's San Yuanli's powerful imagery and fighting wind, reached the source of a sound of a tumbling die in a glass cup and found breeze, walked into letter, and Sarubia Coffee Shop, where air hardly moved but the truth did. I collected badges of which many have already been given away, missed coffee, stared at life waiting for death, and really there was too much more. I've yet to see a good deal of the single channel videos, and will, to fully appreciate the depth of this show. I'm not out of breath, just feel I should refrain from saying more. I have time. Four hundred yen gets you in, and you get a card so you can go back anytime. The exhibition runs to February 15. The three curators, the 56 artists, Japan Foundation, the vibe in this exhibition, it's great.
Congratulations.