Shun Okada "Sandstorm"

Venue: Gallery Commune

We will be holding an exhibition titled "Sand Storm" by Tokyo-based artist Shun Okada, who attempts to create paintings that explore the gap between digital and analog.

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Television static gradually disappeared with the transition from analog to terrestrial digital broadcasting. Officially known as snow noise, this phenomenon is made up of countless grainy, moving black and white dots. While this noise has a somewhat frightening image, often used in horror movies, I found it to be somewhat meditative and calming rather than frightening.

Once, when I was temporarily depressed, I turned to noise.

When I first started painting, I didn't copy it like a photograph, but simply applied black and white paint to the canvas in a methodical manner. What emerged after I finished was not a monotonous canvas with evenly spaced black and white, but a complex canvas with a noise-like "fluctuation."

When there is no channel to receive, analog television receives weak radio waves floating in space, amplifies them, and displays them as noise. These are the aftereffects of all kinds of movement, including the aftereffects of the cosmic microwave background radiation generated at the time of the Big Bang. When I thought about the "fluctuations" that appear in my work, I thought of myself as a receiver, expressing the weak aftereffects of the various things that exist around me as "fluctuations." This is noise that is received and generated by humans, not television.

The reason I decided to create a noise work again this time was because the deserted streets during the COVID-19 pandemic felt as lonely as a television that had been turned off. This loneliness was not like a digital television where the screen suddenly goes blank, but rather it contained the complexity of people individually battling anxiety and loneliness, like the noise of a screen that continues to fluctuate as it receives a faint signal despite being turned off.

Currently, the city is gradually regaining its vitality, but the social turmoil shows no signs of subsiding. Many people are struggling to survive in this situation. I continue to "output" onto canvas, incorporating into my paint the aftereffects of each individual person living their own life amidst this chaotic situation.

- Shun Okada

Okada Shun dispelled anxious thoughts and actions by creating noise artworks. This is a record of the several months he spent painting, as if he had become a highly sensitive, wide-band human receiver, liberating not only his own energy but also that of others. Please come and see it at the venue.

Shun Okada |
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1992, he currently lives in Tokyo. He grew up with the explosive growth of digital devices. He is interested in early digital phenomena such as analog noise and bugs in the Famicom, which are now being lost, and creates paintings that explore the gap between digital and analog.
Instagram: @oka_un