We are pleased to present Eiki Okuda's "PAUSE", an exhibition of his new video installation and the first exhibition held at Hanare Window, our new gallery space in Shinsen, Shibuya.

While he was a student of oil painting, Okuda started dealing with video games and television as his subject matters after he committed to animation in his junior year of Tokyo University of the Arts. He has created various video installations that deal with such digital medias. And this time, we present his most recent work "PAUSE". The title suggests the temporary stop that intermits someone's playing a video game. The function of the pause makes the thing that is impossible in the real world to happen, like it is able to capture the moment of the character's jumping into the air. It is to move this stopped screen captured by the pause button that Okuda tries to make happen in his new installation. He chose over 200 images of paused screens from about 1200 titles of video games, and assembles and plays them at high speeds by which the viewer can feel the background surrounding the word "PAUSE" is subtly moving. This sense of motion is unique for Okuda's work, which is different from that we can perceive in the real world.

Moreover, this installation is projected on a window of Hanare, our new gallery space, which enables people outside the gallery to see this installation without entering into it. In other words, Okuda's work also "pauses" the people's motion passing through in front of the gallery, suggesting that it will emerge as the intersection of reality and virtual reality, whose borderline is blurred in the recent society we live in. His "PAUSE", dealing with the unreality that video games have, gives us the chance to think about the relationship between the real world and the virtual world in the present society.