A Certain Collector B

Born in 1980, Yosuke Bandai is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in photography. Highly active since 2000, his work has been featured widely in both group and solo exhibitions. Notable recent solo shows include: "Friday, September 9 - Friday, October 7, 2016" (TARO NASU, Tokyo 2016), "Passing Man" (CAPSULE, Tokyo 2015), and "I trust only the rib, after all, you know?" (TARO NASU, Tokyo 2014). Bandai's "the lid on the hole" (2016) is a well-known series in his oeuvre, and consists of photographs of items in various states of decay that have been reassembled into sculptural objects as an expression of his unique sensitivities. For the series, Bandai traveled to forests and other desolate sites far from the city's prying eyes, where he spent the night cobbling together illegally-dumped refuse. His photographs depicting waste material reborn in the morning light suggest an indifferent humor in the face of his creations' foreboding loneliness. A Certain Collector B is Bandai's first publication. The volume is a repository of his ongoing project that collects wayfaring material found strewn on the street-sides, reassembled into objects photographed on a flatbed scanner. These images - some of which curiously contain the carcasses of once-living creatures - are uniquely devoid of depth and scale when illuminated under the scanner's penetrating light, seemingly transfigured into a new breed of materiality, weightless as if floating on a 3DCG modelling screen. The publication's design takes a cue from the physical works in A Certain Collector B, and can be understood as an amalgamation of constituent parts. The front and inside covers have disparate coloration, and the cheesecloth which conventionally preserves a book's structural integrity is instead baldly exposed. Moreover, the prints have been tipped-in by hand, fulfilling the concept that the volume is the private album of a fictive collector known only as "B. " A thorough feast for the senses, A Certain Collector B is simultaneously a first tome that embodies Bandai's sense of balance as the omniscient artist with a bird's eye awareness of his own process.