Eating Body consists of nine dishes and their accompanying texts, and as the title suggests, the theme is "eating body". The texts contain quotations from cookbooks, essays by thinkers, and satirical novels from the Middle Ages, which point out that the body is shaped by eating manners and utensils such as cutlery, as well as the power and discrimination associated with them. In conjunction with such references to the plasticity of the "eating body" and the socio-political relations surrounding it, various utensils such as hand-held food, spoons, knives and forks, and chopsticks are provided to the guest for each dish, and the waiter suggests how to eat the food.

In the first half of the course, the guest is able to complete the meal with little physical exertion (hence almost passive) by savoring the bite-sized appetizers that are cooked so well that they hardly need to be chewed. However, when a cutlery-intensive dish is served in the middle of the course, the guest has to use a knife and fork to chop the food into edible pieces and combine the elements on the plate by themself. In addition, the text presented along with the food shows that this preliminary "chewing" with cutlery is also transforming the human skeleton.

In this work, the sequence of the course meal and the accompanying text present the viewer with a sense of the politics of the body, such as the fact that the body is reconfigured by systems and disciplines, and that such actions are sometimes carried out in the invisible realm of the kitchen.

── Translated by DeepL

The work, which is narrated by the artist himself overlaid with footage of him cooking and his guests eating, focuses on the relationship between the processing of ingredients and the body of the eater in eating manners and cooking techniques, and examines the unit of the subject.

The purée, which was popular among French aristocrats in the 17th century, was a meal that externalized physiological functions by having slaves and servants grind the ingredients in advance so that the food could be consumed without the need to engage in animal activities such as chewing and digestion. As the title suggests, the work develops from the starting point of this purée. Puree has a history of being used to show off power due to the time and effort required to prepare it, and at the same time, today it is used as a meal to care for people with chewing problems, such as infants and the elderly.

The work begins with facts about the relationship between eating etiquette and the body, such as the fact that the spread of table knives and forks brought about changes in human chewing, and that such physical deformations occurred separately in the West and the East. The narrative then develops into the issue of the subjectivity of the mouth that feeds and speaks, such as how the subject of "we" is literally brought about by the collective mouth through the practice of "human microphones" chanted by the protesters at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in the United States.

The mouth that feeds changes its role, sometimes physically, by relating to various devices. The work shows that the utensils and mouths that are mobilized in the act of eating establish various relationships each time, thereby constructing the subject of eating each time. Through the history of eating etiquette and cooking, this work presents the complex and plastic nature of the subject that emerges each time.

Overlaid on the images of skillful cooking, the film talks about the difficulty of making other countries' dishes using ingredients available in one country, or translating one language into another, and the creativity that emerges. In the film, we find the richness of the fact that cultures and languages are not strictly translated, and that cultures are formed from situations where translation fails and the two become mixed up.

── Excerpt from Aichi Triennial: Taming Y/Our Passion

The works were created using a feature called the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop, an image-editing software. This function is usually used to remove dust captured during shooting or elements that were unintentionally captured.

The Spot Healing Brush tool, first implemented in Photoshop CS5 which is released in 2010, fills a selected area naturally by analyzing the image around the area and extracting textures from similar areas in the image to generate a pattern.

In these works, this tool is used for the photograph which captures several objects and digital devices that display the picture of these objects at the same time. In such photographs, the real objects and the photographic images are placed on the same picture, so even if the textures of these objects are similar, the space in which they are placed may be different; some may be in real space, others in the space that the photograph represents. However, because computers treat images as a mere collection of pixels, they cannot make categorical decisions which means that they cannot distinguish real objects from the objects displayed in photographs. Therefore, the texture of a real object may be used to generate a texture of an object represented in a photograph, or conversely, the texture of an object in the photograph may be used to generate a texture of an object in the real space. In these works, the algorithm of the tool with properties as such treats the multiple spaces that the photographs represent and the real space in which photographs are placed equally, thereby forming a space in which all space interpenetrates.

── Excerpt from Audio Guide, 2019

The colorings and texts on these works are based on the object detection with neural network. The object detection algorithm used in these works is the same type as that used in self-driving car.

A series of works consists of several photographs, images captured from the Internet, and so on, including different views of the same situation. These images come with texts that list the detected objects in addition to the coloring by the object detection algorithm. However, images in the same situation viewed from different angles may be recognized differently showing different texts, or images in different situations may have exactly the same text. These results depend on how the algorithm works.

The object detection algorithm statistically determines what is shown in images based on a huge number of images and data about objects in the images prepared by humans, but it does not take account of the context of the scene displayed in the image. Therefore, the detection of the object depends largely on the given data to the algorithm. In fact, determining what an image shows is very contextual. For example, deciding whether an image is "a picture of a desk." or "a picture of books, a notebook, a pen and a coffee cup" can vary depending on what kind of situation the person making the decision is in. Although the algorithm makes decisions based on a single criterion of given data, these decisions can vary inherently depending on the situation. It can be said that this weirdness of the texts on the works are caused by the difference between the object detection algorithm and human judgment.

── Excerpt from Audio Guide, 2019

Audio Guide seems deceptively simple on the first glance. The title refers literally to the audio guide system that is being used to assist audience in navigating and understanding the displayed artworks. However, soon after the audience starts using the prepared system, a strange journey will begin to be embarked. The Audio Guide creates parallel realities for the displayed objects through its audio descriptions, re-contextualizing the objects as well as the art experience itself. The work plays with the relationships between perception, recognition and description. It forces the audience to critically re-examine the things that were being shown, perceived and told. The work reverses the usual role between the work and its caption, subverting the logic of common art exhibition practices in which the work is usually considered to be prior(the primary)and its caption to be posterior(the derivative). Audio Guide is a work about objects, information, language and how the artist disrupted their relationships by re-purposing a new discursive open space.

── Excerpt from False Spaces

Along with the familiar startup sound, a computer installed in the exhibition space suddenly launches, and the default desktop image begins to move. The title of this work is at once the name of a Mac operation system that was inspired by the Sierra Nevada, and the video that is shown is all about that mountain range in California, including a matter-of-fact narration telling a tragic story during the American western frontier period. During the playback of the video, viewers are free to access other videos and previously viewed Google Street View images via links on the desktop.

One aim in the development of information operation devices is the improvement of usability, or in other words, to make the device itself as “invisible” as possible. The encounter on the desktop between the macOS itself and facts related to the place that inspired its name recalls the historical backgrounds and material characteristics of the device that is supposed to disappear from our conscious mind.

── Excerpt from the caption in "Open Space 2018"(NTT Intercommunication Center)

Equilibres, the title, is from an eponymous series of works produced by the Swiss artist duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss from 1984 to 1986.

The “Equilibres” (meaning “balance” in French) series consists of photographs of three-dimensional artworks composed of assemblages of household articles and objects in the studio. Nagata regards them as “sculptured works that circulate as images.” He believes the series has a strong relationship with land art and earthworks that arose in the late 1960s and circulated in magazines, artwork collections, and cinema-like media. In Nagata’s view, “Equilibres” reversed the relationship between artwork and documentation in land art and earthworks, whose works were distributed as images. It showed that even fragile objects could constitute sculptures if photographed and titled. In short, it was a humorous exposure of the nature of sculpture as a happening.Herein lies the reversal, i.e., the genesis of value as an artwork not on the side of the original object (≒artwork), but on that of the photograph, which could be considered a copy of it. This superiority of image over matter echoes the situation that colored the 1980s, when televised media began to exert its influence over all aspects of society.

In this exhibition, Nagata drew on the photographic works of “Equilibres” as he produced sculptures by making 3D models that he printed with a 3D printer. “Equilibres” contained plural photographs of the same object; Nagata similarly produced plural works that have mutually different titles although they look to be exactly the same. In the process of creating works based on “Equilibres”, which made artworks out of copies (photographs) of artworks, the relationship between object and image, and copy and original, becomes more complex. Nagata is striving to grasp the problem of image in the contemporary age by contemplating the issue of “sculptured works circulating as image” created in the mass-media age of the 1980s against the background of today’s media environment.

── Excerpt from the press release