Statement
Bontaro Dokuyama examines how contemporary societies are formed and transformed through infrastructures, mobility, logistics, and networks. Through research-based practices across video, installation, sculpture, painting, and AI, he investigates how the movement of people, objects, information, and culture shapes communities, histories, and social structures.
His practice emerged from the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident on March 11, 2011. The disaster not only transformed the landscape and society of Fukushima, his hometown, but also fundamentally challenged the modern assumptions of safety and progress. This experience revealed that social systems considered self-evident are continuously reorganized through political, technological, economic, and environmental forces, while generating new relationships through movement and connection.
Modernization has built nations, cities, and communities through infrastructures such as transportation, logistics, communication, and energy systems. At the same time, these structures have been continuously reshaped through colonialism, war, industrialization, disasters, and globalization. Infrastructure is not merely a technological foundation; it enables movement while also producing boundaries, exclusions, and structures of power.
Through ongoing field research in Japan, East Asia, Japanese diasporic communities in the United States, South Africa, and other regions, Dokuyama investigates traces embedded in places, archives, and overlooked memories. His works connect individual experiences and collective histories with the present, revealing the layered networks embedded within landscapes and social systems.
Rather than preserving history, his practice uses history as a lens to examine how contemporary societies have been formed. By tracing networks of mobility, logistics, and exchange beyond the framework of the modern nation-state, he explores how communities are continually reconfigured within changing social conditions.
Through his work, Dokuyama asks how people might create relationships with others and imagine new forms of community in a world shaped by constant movement and transformation.