Fuyuhiko Takata

Rapunzel eagerly awaits her prince from her tower top singing “Someday My Prince Will Come”. Her hair is extremely long and can reach far away outside of the tower. She starts to spin and rewind her locks in order to catch her unseen prince. As the spinning movement proceeds, Rapunzel becomes highly emotional. Eventually she loses sight of her initial aspiration and transforms into a mere yarn-ball-like, cocoon-like black mass. Meanwhile, the world outside of the tower is ruined by Rapunzel’s rampaging hair. The chaos created is as if some apocalyptic natural disaster has taken place.

In this video and performance, Takata wears a wig in the fashion of an ancient Japanese hairstyle and transforms himself into the character of Susano-o, a Shinto god who appears in the Japanese creation myth. The erection between his legs, is in the form of a Japan-shaped penis. The artist believed that the Japanese archipelago looked like male genitalia standing erect towards the Pacific Ocean. From this idea, he assembled his mythological image of creation and destruction.

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!

In this video, half-naked models do the “love exercise”, one at a time. Many small doll faces are glued to their bodies. The doll faces are both male and female, their lips puckered as if they are about to kiss. There appears a yellow cupid, controlled by the videographer (Takata). He gives instructions such as “Make this one and this one kiss!” to the models, and they need to contort their bodies in order to make the two chosen faces kiss. For some identified “couples” however, the task is impossible no matter how hard the models struggle. Ignoring their agony, the cupid whimsically continues to make unreasonable requests.

A mermaid dreams of becoming human in this gory, romantic music video.

A high school boy is dozing on the train when from his chest, something sticks out as if his heart or soul were escaping. This is a kind of game that Japanese boys play, hiding one arm under their shirts and moving it back and forth. It is usually just a simple trick used to surprise someone, but Takata wanted to convert this silly boy’s prank into a more romantic gesture where the high school boy is flirting with another boy sitting next to him, using the tentacle-like appendage protruding from his chest.

One night, two enchanted birds fly in through the window of a sleeping adolescent boy. Perching upon his ear, these magical creatures recount fantastic and peculiar folk tales into the teenager’s mind, as if speaking directly into his dreams. Relating an erotic fable of an Arabian princess who escapes her palace to spend lurid evenings with common men, the birds entice the young man toward his own desire. Their elaborate narrative, which unfolds with ambiguous shifts in genders and protagonists, escalates in intensity until it is suddenly interrupted, just before it reaches the best part of the story.

This video work was based on the request by dance critic Satoru Kimura to create a video using Nijinsky’s ballet “Afternoon of a Faun” as a motif. The original ballet depicts alluring nymphs by a lake, and a faun who in his attraction to the dancers attempts to seduce them. Takata however recreated the ballet into a story of the faun’s own narcissism. In Takata’s version, the faun shows no interest in the nymphs and continues to take photos of himself with a selfie stick. On the other hand, the nymphs lift and swing the faun’s body attempting to disturb the complete absorption he has for his own world. In the end, the faun finally wakes up after having been dragged around by the nymphs who have gradually become violent.

Frida Kahlo, Aung San Suu Kyi, Madonna, Elizabeth I, Judith. The heads of “strong women” from history are being stacked like a totem pole in this video. The artist appearing in a goddess-like form places the heads on the top of the pole, trying to balance them so that the tower does not collapse. From somewhere a divine voice calls the next name, and the artist kicks up to place the next woman’s head on the pole. The divine voice is actually the artist’s mother’s voice that has been digitally altered. This work was based on the artist’s own family background in which he was raised by a doting, feminist mother. In the personal myth that he creates, he attempts to visualize a unity with his strong mother’s image.