The artist explores the hidden history of the tilapia, a small creature that once swam along the routes of Japan’s imperial southward expansion before becoming part of Thailand’s Cold War development projects. The tilapia was introduced into Southeast Asia through networks of colonialism and war, from East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, Malaya, and Singapore, as a source of protein for the empire’s advance. In 1965, a gift of fifty young tilapia from Crown Prince Akihito of Japan to King Rama IX transformed the fish into a royal symbol of friendship, later spreading across the country as “the King’s fish.”

This video essay overlays the journey of the tilapia with the story of a former U.S. military base that has been repurposed as a fish hatchery, highlighting how the species carries within it the intertwined legacies of empire, international aid, and agricultural reform. The work examines the overlaps between myth and power and reveals how postwar development continued to follow the currents of imperial ambition, shaping the ecological and political landscapes of Southeast Asia.

According to one etymology, the Korean word for alcohol, sul, combines su (water) and bul (fire), as the froth of fermenting liquor was thought to resemble water brought to a boil by an inner flame. This documentary video essay draws on field research into rice cultivation and brewing on the Korean Peninsula during Japanese colonial rule, using sul as a lens to examine the mechanisms and legacies of colonization.

During the occupation, the promotion of modified rice cultivars, laboratory-isolated koji and yeast, and the consolidation of breweries aimed to increase food production and tax revenue. These changes left a lasting imprint: many Korean farmers and brewers still use colonial-era rice strains and Japanese-style koji and yeast. The governance of grain and drink is thus embedded in invisible agents—genes, microbes, and legal frameworks —that continue to shape contemporary flavors. Interweaving interviews, archival materials, and essayistic narration, the film explores this lingering, unseen “fire in water.”

Fire in Water is a lecture-performance built on research into how Japanese colonial rule shaped brewing and rice farming in Korea. The work looks at two closely related cultures—Korea and Japan—and asks how they clashed, assimilated, or othered one another through invisible agents such as bacteria, microbes, legal rules, and social norms.

Drawing on a study of the parallels and gaps between Korean and Japanese brewing, the piece offers a drink made by blending ingredients and methods from both sides. Japanese techniques moved into Korea during the colonial years, and because the two brewing traditions were already alike, the transfer became both a form of translation and a moment of fusion.

The cultural mixing that began in the late 19th century removed many material differences between Korean and Japanese alcohol, yet it did not erase all distinctions. Instead, it brings to light differences that cannot be reduced to physical factors alone. Comparative-literature scholar Emily Apter notes that translation is not a clear bridge between two languages; it is a contested zone where they collide and mingle. In this work the audience literally tastes that translation zone, where two cultures—and the microbes and institutions tied to them—meet on the tongue.

Becoming Salmon is an animated work set in a salmon farming facility, portraying the intertwined lives of a parasite-infected salmon and an aging worker. Though both are situated within an industrialized environment where life is reduced to commodity or labor and subjected to control, their shared experiences of illness and aging place them at the margins of that system. Through their relationship, t he work explores the tensions between capitalist systems of value and the dignity of life.

The animation is presented alongside a video work titled How to Become Salmon. This companion piece documents conversations held during the production of Becoming Salmon, in which artist Nagata speaks with curators, artists, and anthropologists about what it means to be a salmon. The discussions examine the conditions under which imaginative engagement with a voiceless other—such as a salmon— becomes possible, and how such forms of imagination might take shape.

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.

Translation Zone is a video essay in which the artist's own narration in English with a Japanese accent is superimposed over the video of himself cooking. The narration discusses cross-cultural translation in molecular gastronomy and anthropology, and the friction that accompanies such translation, using examples such as “fried rice” in various languages and the vulnerabilities associated with machine translation.

The film discusses the multi-ethnic cultures of Singapore and the localization of foreign cultures in Japan, and demonstrates how the mixing of multiple cultures is the process of cultural creation itself. When cooking food from other countries with ingredients available in Japan or translating one language into another, discrepancies and frictions are inevitable. This film focuses on this misalignment and friction, and identifies the source of cultural abundance in situations where translations fail or become intermingled.

For the 2023 solo exhibition "One and Several Narratives," a Japanese-language dubbed version of the work was produced and shown alongside a mobile library stocked with documents and books related to the piece. By broadening the issue of cultural translation that the work raises into a wider question of communication, the exhibition set out to turn the entire venue into a “Translation Zone.”

Taste in the Making is a food-centered, experiential artwork in which the artist serves a series of desserts based on his research on the impact of Japanese colonial rule on Taiwan’s agriculture and food culture. Each dish is accompanied by text detailing its historical and technical background, presenting the origins of each dish to guests not only through its taste but also through its narrative.

While Japan’s colonization of Taiwan brought about various changes to the island’s natural environment and cultural landscape, it also influenced Japanese food culture through the introduction of Taiwanese products. How was colonial modernity received in Taiwan, and what kinds of cultural and political meanings did Taiwanese products carry in Japan? The work presents four small desserts, each designed around these questions. Through tasting them, participants engage with historical and political narratives surrounding food.

Feasting Wild consisted of six sections: " Untouched Nature," " Domestication," "Nature as Other," "Becoming Feral," "Conditioned Wildness," and "From the Wasteland," with a total of 10 dishes and 5 paired drinks. In each section, audiences are handed a sheet with quotations from books on the theme, followed by a menu with captions of the ingredients and dishes, and the dishes are served in turn.

The work is research-based on the topics of hunting and gathering, animal domestication, and aquaculture and fisheries, and its starting point is the question, "what does it mean for an animal to be wild?" The control of animal and plant life, including microorganisms, in food production creates a heterogeneous field where human and non-human agency are entangled with each other and where the artificial and the natural become indistinguishable. In this work, it is the state of the "wild," which cannot be reduced to the opposition between nature and culture as a modern concept, that is the key concern.

Each dish features ingredients that were researched or discovered in the process of research, and the caption sheets tell the story of the ingredients and cooking methods used to prepare them. By not only verbally understanding the themes and stories on the sheets, but also by eating dishes prepared with related ingredients and cooking methods, visitors experience the work both conceptually and physically.

Eating Body consists of nine dishes and accompanying texts, and as the title suggests, the theme is "bodies that eat". The texts include quotations from cookbooks, essays by thinkers, and satirical novels from the Middle Ages that suggest that the body is shaped by eating habits 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 can complete the meal with little physical effort (almost passively) by enjoying the bite-sized appetizers that are cooked so well that they require little chewing. When, on the other hand, a cutlery-intensive dish is served in the middle of the course, the diner needs to use a knife and fork to cut the food into edible pieces and combine the elements on the plate. In addition, the text presented with the food shows that this preliminary "chewing" with cutlery also transforms the human skeleton.

In this work, the sequence of the 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 sometimes take place in the invisible realm of the kitchen.

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

This work was created using Photoshop’s spot healing brush tool. This tool is used to remove blemishes and elements that were unintentionally included from photographs.

The spot healing brush tool was added to the 2010 release of Photoshop CS5. It analyzes the region around the area selected by the user, extracts texture from similar places in the image, and generates a pattern that covers up the selected area in a natural-appearing manner.

Ordinarily this tool is used to “erase” unwanted material captured when photographs are taken, or dust introduced when images are scanned. What actually happens is that an image based on the region surrounding the selected area is “painted over” the blemish. The result is that unintended material or blemishes are supplemented by a texture deduced from the surrounding area. That is very similar to what we usually do when we use our imagination to complete an image of something that is hidden and invisible.

In this work, the original photograph was divided into multiple areas and the spot healing brush tool applied to erase and supplement parts of them. This process was applied to all the areas. Having undergone this process, the original image disappears completely. Only parts formed by being painted over, supplemented, by the software, remain. This process resembles what happens to memories when we repeatedly forget and try to recall them, until nothing is left of their original form.

── Excerpt from Audio Guide, 2022

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