Kohei Ando
This May, we are delighted to present a screening of three works by legend of experimental cinema Kohei Ando — the classic My Collections (1988) along with two cine-poems after Shuji Terayama, The Summer I Was Four and Astronomy of Love. Ando was recently honoured at New York’s Prismatic Ground Festival as the recipient of the 2026 Ground Glass Award, for lifetime achievement in the field of experimental film. Ando’s pathbreaking work across film and video, and tireless collaboration, has been crucial to CCJ’s work over the years. It was truly special to see this recognition for his extraordinary career, which has spanned involvement with experimental theater troupes such as Tenjo Sajiki, some of the earliest experiments in synthesized video art, and more recently, the publication of a novel, Whispers of Vermeer.
THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.
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Program
Kohei Ando, My Collections, 1988, 16mm, 10 min. ©️Kohei Ando
My Collections confirms that cataloging and anthologizing are important facets of Ando’s art. Ando is not a taxonomist, but rather, the collections add up to an oblique self-portrait: the first-person answer to Michael Powell’s third-person An Airman’s Letter to his Mother (a five-minutes film made in 1941). Both are films in which the objects a man has gathered in his room serve to define his character, his sensibility and his aspirations. Michael Powell explored a missing airman’s room with an objective eye. Ando explores his own room and recognizes that his treasured possessions amount to an image of himself. Ownership transforms objects: it invests them with memories and brings them into fortuitous conjunctions that may be revealing.
Kohei Ando, The Summer I Was Four, 1:55 min. ©️Kohei Ando
A cinematic rendition of Shuji Terayama’s poem, The Summer I Turned Four. Coastal images — thresholds, waves, expanses — are folded in to those of a statue of a young boy, who looks impassively onto the wide vista, frozen in time.
Kohei Ando, Astronomy of Love, 2:55 min. ©️Kohei Ando
A cinematic rendition of Shuji Terayama’s poem, Astronomy of Love. The sweeping mood of the poem is mirrored in the cosmic landscapes Ando weaves together: lush sunsets, moonlit oceans and twinkling nocturnal cities.
