Bill Viola

The First Retrospective in Asia of one of the World’s Leading Video Artists.

Bill Viola, one of the world’s leading video artists, first traveled to Japan in 1980 on a one-year arts fellowship to study and experience first hand its cultural traditions and religions. He extended his stay by six months to work at Sony’s Atsugi Research Center where he gained access to the most advanced video technology of the time. The influence of both experiences transformed his work.

This exhibition, organized by the Mori Art Museum and The Asahi Shimbun, showcases work from Viola’s productive career, beginning with Hatu-Yume (First Dream) (1981), the 56 minute video he made while staying in Japan, to The Raf, (2004), one of his recent room-size installations. It is his first survey exhibition in Asia, and takes his “first dream” in Japan as a starting point for viewing his subsequent work.

Bill Viola was born in New York in 1951 and graduated from Syracuse University in 1973 where he had already worked for several years with video and electronic music, creating single channel works and experimenting with complex sculptural installations and projections. During that time, Viola encountered and worked with the first generation of video artists, but soon began to make works that tested the current perceived view of video, displaying a new sensibility in his unique use of the medium. By the late 1970s he was already emerging as one of the leading figures in video art. During the ‘80s when the development of a better range and quality of video projectors made them more easily accessible, Viola’s development of the genre of the room size video installation evolved further, creating environments that engulf the observer in moving images and sound. The images in these works range from the shocking to the meditative. The ‘90s saw an expansion of the installation works into “meta” pieces, accretions of several independent works that together create an inner journey for the viewer, such as “Buried Secrets,” five interrelated works for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 1995. From 2000, he began using plasma and LCD screens in works that feature silent, slowed down, moving pictures exploring the human emotions, a theme that Viola has continued to develop. The composition and sensibility of these works were influenced by well-known paintings in the western medieval and renaissance traditions. While utilizing the latest technological developments, Viola has continued to address fundamental themes of the human condition — life, birth, death, rebirth, and the unfolding of consciousness. It is for this reason that Bill Viola's work has a universal appeal that transcends cultures, technologies and trends and continues to move and engage people everywhere.

Viola’s work often shows a strong affinity with Japan: he and his wife and collaborator Kira Perov spent a year and a half living there from 1980, studying Japanese traditional arts and philosophy, including Zen Buddhism and Noh theater, while at the same time producing a video art work at Sony's Atsugi Research Laboratories. This experience and Viola’s connected interest in Eastern philosophy and religion have played a major role in the formation of his unique holistic view of culture and nature and this in turn continues to be a major influence on his artistic development.

This comprehensive exhibition encompasses a wide range of Bill Viola's art. Featuring eight room-size installations and seven flat-screen video pieces, it will be the largest exhibition of Viola’s work since his 1997 retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The title of this exhibition is taken from the video work produced in 1981 in Japan, Hasu-Yume (First Dream). Based on day-to- day recordings made during Viola and Perov’s travels through Japan’s main island of Honshu – from the urban landscapes of Tokyo to the scenery of remote Osorezan (“mountain of souls”)– Hasu-Yume reveals the boundaries that lie between light and dark, ancient and modern, nature and the city, object and subject, rational thought and intuition. The works presented in this exhibition all share a common ancestor in the experiences that created Hatsu-Yume.

The exhibition catalog, with an introduction by David Elliott, texts by David Ross and John Walsh, an interview with Viola and Perov by Akio Obigane, and richly illustrated with images of the work by Kira Perov, will be published in English and Japanese on the occasion of the exhibition. It will be the first publication in Japanese to examine the major periods of Viola’s remarkable career.

Born in New York in 1951, Bill Viola enrolled in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University (New York State) in 1969 where he first began working with video in 1970. In 1971 he became a founding member of the Synapse Video Group that established and operated a cable television broadcasting studio on campus. He created his first video work Wild Hoes in 1972, and also that year became video preparator of Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse where he worked with already established artists in his field such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and Peter Campus. After graduating in 1973, he participated in a music workshop where he met composer David Tudor who became a close mentor. From 1975 he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production in Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe. In the 1970s he travelled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. In 1977 he was invited to Melbourne, Australia by Kira Perov to show his video work, and since 1978, when she moved to New York, they have lived and worked closely together.

Viola received a cultural exchange fellowship and he and Perov lived in Japan from 1980-81, where they met their Zen teacher and mentor Daien Tanaka, who greatly influenced their lives and work. They moved to California in 1981 where Viola taught for a semester at the California Institute of the Arts in 1983, and continued creating videotapes and installations. His first production using 35 mm high-speed film, The Arc of Ascent, was commissioned for 1992 Documenta, Germany, paving the way for his pioneering expansion of the use of slow motion and the manipulation of time. He was recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” Fellowship in 1989, and in 1993 was awarded the first Medienkunstpreis (Germany) and the Skowhegan Medal (New York). He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), and Royal College of Art, London (2004), among others. Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and the large- scale touring retrospective exhibition of his work, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1997, achieved a record number of visitors when it travelled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. In 1998 he was invited to be a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and later that year created a suite of three new video pieces for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour, Fragility. In 2002, Viola completed his most ambitious project, Going Forth By Day, a five part projected digital “fresco” cycle in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. In 2003 the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles produced his solo exhibition "The Passions", comprising a new body of work on human emotions that Viola created in the early 2000s. It toured to three other venues including the National Gallery, London, Fondación “La Caixa” in Madrid and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 2005. In 2004 Viola began collaborating with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tisan and Isolde, which was presented in project form by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2004. The production of the complete opera received its world premiere at the L’Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in April 2005. Bill Viola and Kira Perov live in Long Beach, California with their two sons.

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Bill Viola
Hatsu-Yume (First Dream)