Kaneko Tomotaro & Lou Mallozzi: Sonic Speculations in the Documents of Postwar Japanese Art

Description

Exhibition: September 27 – October 10, 2025
Public Talk and Listening Session as part of Ear Taxi Festival: Tuesday, October 7, 7-9pm
Audible Gallery at ESS

Sonic Speculations in the Documents of Postwar Japanese Art introduces a sound world little known outside Japan: Japanese artists working with sound in galleries and public spaces to interrogate artistic practice and social relations during the cultural and political upheavals of postwar Japan from the 1950s to 1970s. The radical artistic output of this period occurred in the complex context of Japan’s postwar economic boom, the failure of its student uprisings, the Mono-ha movement, Expo ’70, and numerous other factors. It is a period that remains virtually unexplored outside Japan, one that offers much to an increasingly global perspective in the field of the sonic arts.

The Japanese Art Sound Archive is a solo research project by Kaneko to investigate sound in postwar Japanese art. He has realized re-exhibitions and the release of editions bringing this history into an immediate present. Informed by a profound understanding of Japan’s postwar cultural and political context, his detailed and ongoing research introduces the distorted sounds of 1970s Japanese art through images and recordings.

For Sonic Speculations, Kaneko Tomotaro presents photographic images and rare archival recordings from the 1970s played on CDs to reference a “double history” of listening across the transition from analog to digital technologies in an increasingly consumerist economy. 

Artist and educator Lou Mallozzi has pursued parallel paths of research, writing, and artistic production to develop a personal response to the sounds of postwar Japanese artists. Focused on direct sonic encounters with their work and his own audio-centric interpretations amplified by the generosity of artists, curators, and historians, he has produced intentionally subjective essays and sensitive artworks of his own in response to the work he has experienced. One such project is Sidewalk Standstill for Nomura, created in 2024 as an homage to artist Nomura Hitoshi (1945-2023) and in direct response to Nomura’s 1970 performative sound work Telephone Eyeshot. It is presented for the first time in public in Sonic Speculations.

Bios

Tomotaro Kaneko’s field is aesthetics and aural culture. He has organized the Japanese Art Sound Archive since 2017. His recent publications include Oto no Hon wo Yomou: Oto to Geijutsu wo Meguru Book Guide (Reading Books on Sound: A Guide to Writings on Sound and Art) (Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2024), “Arranging Sounds from Daily Life: Amateur Sound-Recording Contests and Audio Culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s” in Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (Routledge, 2023), and a Japanese translation of Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (tr. Nakagawa Katsushi, Kaneko Tomotaro, and Taniguchi Fumikazu, Inscript, 2015). 

Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose works with sound, image, and language seek to destabilize our relationships with the familiar. His performances, installations, and interventions have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Radiorevolten Festival in Halle, TUBE Audio Art series Munich, and many others. Since 2019 he has been researching postwar Japanese artists’ use of non-musical sound and as a result was the guest editor and essayist for the series “Rekindled Present: Sound in Japanese Art 1950s-1970s” for the fall and winter 2024 issues of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (U. of California Press). He is on the faculty of the department of Art and Technology / Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.