Unidentified Landscape
HOTEL ASIA PROJECT 2018

In 2015, HOTEL ASIA PROJECT launched a research-based exhibition project, LANDSCAPE in collaboration with artists, film directors, and researchers from Japan, Thailand, and China. The project has toured several cities including Bangkok, Chongqing, Shanghai, Kitakyushu, and Tokyo. The project seeks to add new and multiple perspectives to the idea of landscape in Asia since the arrival of the modern age through researching how landscape appears in actual urban space, virtual media and internet space including SNS, and films and art works. The research result is shared in the form of exhibition, discussion, symposium, and publication of artist book through which the project proposes various interpretations of landscape.

Since the birth of landscape painting, painters have traveled to various parts of the world to depict the scenery of the places. It was the sketch of a specific place in a specific country when it was depicted. However, since many of them lacked proper recording of the location and date, what we see today have already lost its temporal and spatial specificities. “Unidentified Landscape” is a term used for the works that we cannot specify its location.

This year’s project borrows the idea of unidentified landscape and conducts the exhibition and symposium under the title Unidentified Landscape in Japan, China, Indonesia, and Austria. Building upon the result of previous series, the project seeks to capture the ordinary landscape and the landscape appearing in sketches, photographs, videos, texts, and sounds in order for proposing various perspective and a new interpretation of landscape in contrast to the view to see landscape as geographic, historic, or cultural product or as an arbitrarily formed object of memory, feeling, or desire of the mass. The process and the result of the project will be shared on the Internet and in print as well.

HOTEL ASIA PROJECT is a platform for international collaborative art projects launched in 2011 by Keiichi Miyagawa, a director of GALLERY SOAP, Yoshitaka Mouri, sociologist and professor of Tokyo University of Fine Arts, and Gen Sasaki, Japanese artist. They have also organized the Kitakyushu Biennial since 2007.
In 2011, as a first project, two days symposium and an exhibition were held in GALLERY SOAP, Kitakyushu. Artists, researchers, curators, a journalist and an architect from Japan and Korea were invited there. The second project was given in Kitakyushu Biennial in 2011.

The third project entitled “THE THEME PARK” was held at Organhaus, an art initiative in Chongqing, China, in 2012. The exhibition consisted of re-mixed fragments of information from various media such as TV programs, newspapers, Internet services and so on. Works were developed in collaboration with artists and curators from China, Korea, Norway and Japan.
In 2015, Hotel Asia Project presented a touring exhibition project "REAL ESTATE/LANDSCAPE" at GALLERY SOAP in Kitakyushu, Japan, Bangkok University Gallery in Thailand and LP Art Space in Chongqing, China in collaboration with artists and others.

HOTEL ASIA PROJECT has also organized various curatorial projects, exhibitions, film screenings and music events, and has participated in the international programs.