Mille Côtes: Takao Minami
Ota Fine Arts is pleased to present Mille Côtes, a solo exhibition by Takao Minami, marking his first presentation at the Tokyo space in nine years. The central work which also lends its title to the exhibition, was originally commissioned by Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, a contemporary art center that opened in 2025, in Limoges, France. The completed work is currently installed on the institution’s façade across eight foldable LED screens. For this exhibition, Minami has rearranged the work into a video projection format, accompanied by a newly composed original soundtrack.
Mille Côtes (2024–2025), which translates to "A Thousand Coasts," is a video work that collages and reconstructs footage and sound recordings gathered by Minami during his travels through the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in southwestern France. Starting from Limoges, Minami undertook a circular route over the course of one month, moving through a range of waterscapes, including rivers, lakes, waterfalls, wetlands, and coastlines. Water, which continuously cycles through liquid, gas, and solid states, and at times functions as a mirror, is an inherently “cinematic” medium for the artist. Furthermore, it serves as a symbolic metaphor, connecting the multiple regions that have been integrated into Nouvelle-Aquitaine in 2016.
The visual narrative unfolds horizontally from right to left, reminiscent of an emaki handscroll, but also shifts vertically, evoking the perspective of traditional East Asian landscape sansui painting. The work traces the landscape’s transformation from upstream springs and valleys, through midstream infrastructures such as dams and power plants, to downstream wetlands opening into the ocean.. Minami depicts the French landscape with its distinct mountains, seas, metropolitan areas, and rural farmlands through the lens of Oriental compositional techniques combined with artificial hues evocative of the three primary colors of light (RGB).
At Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the work glows with a neon-like brilliance, creating a striking visual contrast against the 19th-century architecture of the former printing house and the surrounding cobblestone streets. Yet, within this digitally reconstructed landscape, Minami captures the most delicate natural phenomena such as the shimmering of the water’s surface, the fluttering of birds and insects, and the gentle sway of wind and filtered sunlight with an almost uncanny freshness. The slow, deliberate transition of these scenes lends the work an atmosphere that is nothing short of ethereal.
The compelling power of Minami’s work derives not only from the sophistication of the moving image itself, but also from the underlying aesthetic sensibility rooted in painterly composition. Whether evoking the movement of an emaki handscroll through the flow of rivers and waves, or recalling the ink-wash tradition of waterfall paintings in the depiction of dam discharges, every frame of Minami's world possesses the unwavering beauty of a painting. We warmly invite viewers to experience the richly immersive world of Takao Minami’s practice.
