Technology cultivated by each individual should not be used inpart or trivialized for compromise. Art is a series of “technology ofreturn” that is, the means by which to return from points such as“Art is a capitalist game and is meaningless” or “I’m gonna die
someday, and there’s nothing left.” The wilderness of emptiness andrelativity is never an ultimate objective, even if it is your current
destination. While it indeed could be meaningless, there is stillsomething that you want to do. That’s why you turn on your heels toreturn, instead of compromising in the wilderness and pretendingthat it is your destination.

Consider compromise as being “halfway happy.” What it
potentially harbors is the time of future. This year, αM project
presents exhibitions with five artists, who each through theirindividual approach, attempts to study and share technologies
of return for believing in the future in this day and age in which
they live and die.

αM Project 2020 Ŧ 2021
Halfway Happy
Vol. 1

Yutaka Sone
The Last Night of the Stone Age1
2020.8.29 SAT Ŧ 11.14 SAT
13:00 ‒ 20:00
Closed on Sunday, Monday, Holidays.
Entrance FreeYutaka Sone
Born 1965 in Japan. Lives and works in China, Mexico, Belgium and Japan.
His major solo exhibitions include Obsidian, Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing,2017), Day and Night, David Zwirner (New York, 2016), Perfect Moment,Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2011), Like Looking for Snow Leopard,
Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, 2006), Travel to Double River Island / Yutaka Sone,Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (Aichi, 2002). Major group exhibitions
include Tokyo Independent, Exhibition Hall (Tokyo, 2019), Sanguine: Luc
Tuymans on Baroque, Prada Foundation (Mirano, 2018), Whitney Biennale(New York, 2004), Heterotopias, Japan Pavilion (50th Venice Biennale,Venice, 2003), 7th Istanbul Biennial: Egofugal: Fugue from Ego for the Next
Emergence (Istanbul, 2001), Cities on the Move (Vienna, Bordeaux, New York,
Humlebaek, London, Bangkok, Helsinki, 1997–1999), Sculpture Projects
Münster (Munster, 1997).

Guest Curator

Arata Hasegawa

Artist Support:

The Studio Quarter Century
Wufeng Guyi Stone Co. Ltd.
Kawasaki Works Co. Ltd.
Washinoyama Stone. Ltd.
Yoshiki Ura
Yuji Oku
Dai Toshio
Dai Hijikata
Tommy Simoens

1 Double Log (Washinoyama tuff)

2020
2 The Last Night of the Stone Age22020
3 Birthday Party 1965 ‒2020

2020

entrance

3

“In other words, that was the last night of the Stone Age.”
The fire, once burning, calms as if melting. The copper,
swaying between solidifying and liquefying, settles down to be
an amorphous but constant form. The last night of the Stone
Age can be pictured clearly like so. Many people must haveburned many minerals, and multiples of paths must have led
to the beginnings of the next ages. (Here, I will not specify andbreak them down into eras such as the Chalcolithic Age,Bronze Age, Iron Age.) Each region, each civilization must have
had a number of their own last nights of the Stone Age.
On the other hand, however, Sone — as do we — continues
to use stones to survive. Since encountering marble in themid-1990s, many of the works by Sone are made out of stone,
and he works in the company of stonemasons. “90% of theprocess of production is the destruction of stone,” Sone laughs,
but the technique of these craftsmen including Sone’s areexceptional. To this day, they work with the grinder in theirhands to make a living. That is why the Stone Age continues tothis day. The last night of the Stone Age will befall us only in thefar distant future.
For this exhibition, Sone worked with another artist, Kosuke
Nagata, who is younger than him by 25 years, as “Shihanseiki(Quarter Century).” Together, they made a computer out of
marble (PC: The Last Night of the Stone Age (Prototype v1)).
With a strong belief that we are still in the Stone Age, they
aimed to create a water-cooled PC that is compatible with ourMizuki Endo,“Marble Sculpture as Art Project: Yutaka Sone’s Practices and Mediums under Postmodernism,” trans. Edan Corkill, Yutaka Sone: Perfect Moment (Tokyo: Getsuyosha, 2011), 85.

2Surveying the exhibition, one will notice that the mechanics and relationships found in so-called “video installations” cannot be applied. In thisexhibition, the “image” and the “playback device” are at conflict with eachother, neither allowing the other to be the main feature.

3

The Last Night of the Stone Age, 2020, 133 minutes. Editing: Yuji Oku.
Director: Yutaka Sone.

4In the catalogue for the Sculpture Projects Münster, he refers to this work
as a “birthday cake.” The following is the full text:
I try to have my Birthday Parties as often and in as many places as
possible.
In Münster, I will celebrate my birthday with my lover. Just the two ofus. Or another party with children singing for me. Or with my mother,father and other family members. Big parties with friends. Celebrations
with people involved in my projects, anybody who happens to be there
and strangers.
All kinds of music with violin, piano and other instruments. Songs.
Flowers and wine. Lights. Decorations, candles and heartfelt presents (ofcourse I manage it without them). Various words spoken in celebration.
I throw my Birthday Parties in my room, hotel rooms, friends’ flats, local
restaurants, trendy pubs and many other places. As for a birthday cake,I ask someone else to buy one for me, because I wouldn’t feel that it was
my birthday if I myself went to buy it.
A birthday tells the story of each [of] our lives, and it’s the first proof
that we have had a life in this world. Every Birthday Party is a chance forus to remember that all of us live with and among others. Any cities, anyplaces, are built on the personal histories of the people living there. But
we scarcely see any personal histories in public spaces.
Therefore, I record my very own personal history, my Birthday Parties,
on video and edit the tapes. I will make an installation in the museum andthe underground pass of Hauptbahnhof which is [the] most public spacewith countless people walking by.
I record smooth and sleek memoirs of visual images; intimate Birthday
Parties with a tiny cake in a small room, a magnificent one in a granddecorated hall and many, many other Birthday Parties with people singing
songs celebrating my birthday and blowing out candles on cakes.
“Happy Birthday dear Yutaka, Happy Birthday to you!”Someday, after a long, long time, so many things in the world will havetotally changed and nobody will be able to imagine what it is like today.
Then art might be a birthday cake.
I’m making this work, Birthday Party, based on my imagination of thevisual images created in such times in the future.

The Last Night of the Stone Age

Washinoyama is a mountain located in Kagawa Prefecturewith an elevation of 322 meters. The stones mined there arehighly prized, and were being distributed in the Kinki region as
early as the Kofun period (about 300–538AD). Less thana year ago, Sone set up a studio at Washinoyama in preparation
for this exhibition. He has already spent significant timeworking with the local carpenter Ura-san and mason Dai-san,and the relationship is at the foundation of this exhibition /studio. Double Log (Washinoyama tuff) is a conceptualsculpture in which the motif and the material are the subjectsof inversion; but more significantly, this is the first work thatSone made at Washinoyama.
In these confusing times, Sone holds fast to his principles
of production and works to give form to events. He thinks tothe best he can and works as much as he can. They mostly
take place at the same time. Contrary to his dynamic practice,most of the production is done in solitude and, according toSone, is boring. Despite this, Sone’s practice targets society
and involves others. There is hope in this practice 7 . Society
may keep changing drastically, but in Washinoyama, the sun
will keep rising and layers will be laid upon the strata 8 .

Birthday Party 1965–2020

Yutaka Sone, “Yutaka Sone: Birthday Party,” in Sculpture Projects in Münster 1997, ed. Klaus
Bußmann, Kasper König, Florian Matzner (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje,1997), 403-404.

5

In Yutaka Sone: Building Romance (Tokyo: Mitaka City Arts Foundation,1996), the exhibition catalogue for Scoop (Mitaka City Arts Center, 1996,
curated by Natsumi Araki), the Japanese title for this work translates intoVideoworks after Birthday Cake.

6Random playback program. 58 minutes. Data conversion: Yuji Oku,Shunsuke Takamizawa. Programming: Kosuke Nagata. Editing: Yuji Oku.
Director: Yutaka Sone. The subtitle of the work is The Cave of the Atheist.
As early as 1997, Sone has had the idea to have multiple of birthday
parties take place over a non-chronological span of time. The table ismade by Yoshiki Ura, a carpenter in Aji, Takamatsu.

7Of course, Sone’s practice is not the only hope. During our time, multitudesof attitudes and forms are possible, and numerous forms of art exist
simultaneously. Halfway Happy has just only begun.

8

石器時代最後Ǉ夜

An overwhelmingly long time ago, there were people whoattempted to heat and melt native copper. Unable to heat highenough, perhaps due to the lack of technology back then,
their smelted copper would cool and harden overnight. “Inother words,” Sone says.

It would appear that Sone is making an art project out of the very tensionthat exists between these two forms of labor. By bringing production-laborwhich is external to relational art, to the center of his practice, and byclearly introducing into that the mediums of “encounter” and “relationship,” and also the process of dialogue, his series of marble sculpture [sic]takes on the form of a single project. Accordingly, the exhibition of marble
sculptures can be seen as a presentation of a project.

Vol. 1

Double Log (Washinoyama tuff)

In the catalogue for the Yutaka Sone: Perfect Moment exhibition which
took place in 2011, guest curator Mizuki Endo corrects the misconceptionthat Sone’s practice is “regressing.” However, the same catalogue intentionally employs free translation. The following is the translation of theappropriate excerpt:

約束Ǉ凝集

The Last Night of the Stone Age

1Halfway Happy

Independent Curator

For the Sculpture Projects Münster (1997) that takes place
every ten years, Sone threw his own birthday party every
day, which he documented and collated into a video, Birthday
Party 4 . In this work, where Sone’s birthday is celebrated
continuously, contradicting elements — fiction and reality,
the private and the public — are also celebrated. The monumentality conceived by sculpture (the permanent and rigid
attribution of “celebration”) is spontaneous, light, and canswiftly restructure itself into something repetitive, and radiate
festiveness in multiple directions.
It is not widely known that Sone started this work before
1997 and has continued intermittently even after 1997 5 .
(Sone’s own child had begun to believe that birthday parties
were meant to take place every day, so Sone stopped for sometime.) Birthday Party 1965–2020 was newly created withthese later footages 6 .
Birthday Party 1965–2020 and The Last Night of theStone Age are being played from the same marble PC. Thereis a force that expands while traversing between the pastand the future and a force that carves while reversing, thattogether, penetrate the space.

current ecological conditions. This is a collaborative production
by these two artists. The video played out of the PC captures
the labor, or production, of those who crush, sand, and arecovered in dust, shouting in foreign tongues at each other tomake the best work, and the passing of time of the Stone Age 3 .

αM Project 2020 Ŧ 2021

Giving Form to Events Arata Hasegawa

The Last Night of the Stone Age is the first installment in aseries of exhibitions at gallery αM titled Halfway Happy and is
Yutaka Sone’s solo exhibition. Here, I would like to introduce
the works exhibited in the show and describe the principles
behind Yutaka Sone’s works.
This exhibition consists of three new installation works,
The Last Night of the Stone Age, Birthday Party 1965–2020,
Double Log (Washinoyama tuff). It may seem surprising that
this is an exhibition composed of video installations, asopposed to individual sculpture works. It should be even more
surprising for those who are familiar with Sone’s earlier works
and how they transitioned from project-based video works tomarble sculpture pieces 1 . However, the back-and-forth from
sculpture to video is a mere consequence of Sone’s principlesof production 2 . What is more relevant to Sone is what hestrives to achieve at an earlier juncture.
Through his works, Sone strives to give form to “events.”
These “events” are the fleeting, miraculous moments, thelandscapes that are ordinarily mere backgrounds. They disappear quickly, writhe in one’s sleep, are below the ground,rumble at high speed, and are forever in the future. And there
exists the hope and the realization of giving them form andallowing them to be seen and touched.
To realize this seemingly impossible situation, Sone
attempts to make multiples of antagonizing movements
contend with each other. It is as if to say that paradoxes mustbe spinning at high speed to give form to “events,” so opposing
times, contrasting mechanics, and multiples of technologies
are required to run at their maximum capacity.