TEZUKAYAMA GALLERY is pleased to present “SYNOPTES,” a solo exhibition by Daisuke Ida.

Daisuke Ida was born in 1987 in Tottori, Japan, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. In 2015, he completed the master’s course at the Tokyo University of the Arts, majoring in sculpture. In 2022, he participated in “Grid Island” at the Seoul Museum of Art. Currently participating in the “Distant Present Universal / Remote” at Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, has been active in Japan and abroad.

While questioning the expressive form of sculpture, Ida has used various media, including sculpture, video, and 3DCG, to visualize the invisible structures and concrete events of contemporary society and the consciousness and desires of the people living there.
Since 2016, he has been working on “Photo Sculpture,” a series of sculptures of objects and bodies after the Internet, using anonymous images uploaded by people all over the world as materials. In addition, he has been dealing with themes such as the growing disparity of wealth and the excessive emphasis on productivity amid modernization and globalization and attempting to reveal the distortion of the social system and the friction and dilemmas that arise from it through his artwork.

These activities can be seen as the artist’s personal awareness of the question of how an individual’s existence with reality is connected or connected to the “whole” world by examining the “details” and using them as a starting point. Ida poses various “questions” to the viewer about society and the world, which has a large amount of “homework” to do against the backdrop of the times and regions in which he has lived.

In his solo exhibition “The Covered Finger” at Tezukayama Gallery in 2019, he presented a work focusing on the “mannequin” that has replaced sculpture as the representation of the “ideal human body” as “modern sculpture” as a genre has lapsed due to the trend of modernization in society. Ida is one of the artists who have accepted and self-referenced sculptural expression after the digital machine tools represented by 3D printers and laser cutters. It was inevitable that the mannequin, reflecting the image of the “ideal human body” that is constantly being dismantled and transformed by reproduced images, should be treated as the “origin” of data sculpture in the 21st century.

In this exhibition, he presents works that address the themes of physicality and changes in perspective in the post-corona (the virtual appearing virtual in reality), as well as the surveillance society. The title of this exhibition, “SYNOPTES,” is a coined word that combines the Greek myth of “Argos Panoptes,” a giant with numerous eyes, and the concept of “Synopticon” proposed by the Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen. Drawing on the myth of the numerous-eyed giant, from which the term ‘panopticon’, referring to a surveillance system that appeared in the 8th century, is derived, Ida sculpts the figure we live in today.