Sporting longish brown curly hair and a skittish glance, American Tom Sachs bounded into Tokyo for his first Tokyo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery, bringing with him a refreshing whiff of New York art culture.
Sachs is accustomed to being shown in major European and New York galleries, and received worldwide notoriety for the "Kill All Artists" performance in 1994. He has become known as a maverick whose main body of work is inspired by commercialism and technology. Sachs subverts received culture in order to present his personal take on various given realities, dualities, functions and roles.
For his piece "Sony Outsider (Gaijin)," which was exhibited in the United States and France last year, he designed a perfect full-scale model, coated in white polyurethane, of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in World War II. The interior is also white, but instead of the bomb's mechanism, it contains a sumptuous leather-covered living space, complete with a sink, urinal and DVD player. The piece suggests that modern-day technology can cause as much destruction as Fat Man did in World War II.