Survival Racing Car
(Type: Dr. O -Ochanomizu-)
Atom Suit Project:
The World's Fair in Osaka 1
Kenji Yanobe
Atom Boy Returns to Save the World!?
November 18, 2000 – January 14, 2001
BABILONIA 1808 proudly presents an exhibition of Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe, to inaugurate its exhibition space in Berkeley, California. Atom Boy Returns to Save the World!? will open on November 18, 2000 with a reception from 6–8pm, open to the public.
The exhibition was organized by Elizabeth Brown, former curator of the University Art Musuem at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Yanobe, born in 1965 in Osaka, Japan, grew up heavily influenced by television characters such as Tetsuwan Atom (a.k.a. Astro Boy), Godzilla and Ultraman. The artist's work tackles issues of destruction and survival in a darkly humorous way. He designs sci-fi inspired atom suits, futuristic coin-operated vehicles, and other apparati for navigating a disintegrating future. Yanobe incorporates Geiger counters for measuring radiation and cosmic rays into his fantastic inventions, reminding us of the threatening world we inhabit.
Yanobe's work is not a stranger to the Bay Area: San Francisco's Center for the Arts Galleries at Yerba Buen Gardens hosted Yanobe's American solo debut in the form of a travelling large-scale exhibition titled Survival Train System in 1997. Represented by Rontgen Kunstraum in Tokyo and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, Yanobe's work has been exhibited world-wide, in Zurich, Amsterdam, Austria, Berlin, Kyoto, Seattle, and Australia.
Several photo light boxes included in the exhibition document the artist's visits to desolate ruins such as the radioactive wasteland of Chernobyl, site of the infamous 1986 nuclear accident, and the abandoned 1970 World's Fair grounds in Osaka, Japan. During a two-week residency hosted by Babilonia1808, Yanobe traveled to the Grand Canyon and the Salt Flats in Utah to create a new photographic series while clad in his signature yellow atom suit.
Other current Yanobe projects include shows at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Sept. 16 - Oct. 28 2000), Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland (Oct. 6 - Dec. 3 2000), and an exhibition at the Barbican Art Center in London (Nov. 15 - January 2001).