Rendered as "What We See" in English, the title of this show should perhaps more accurately follow the Japanese one, which would be: "Dream, Reality, Illusion?"
"Video" art is now mostly moribund because technology has changed, leaving that form of expression as largely digitized and stored on hard disc. Subsequent names for the new form such as "moving image" and "time-based" art have appeared, but those terms are divorced from the artist's medium. It is as if we are being asked to take into account special characteristics of an art of movement that is being described as unfolding time. How this kind of visual artwork is significantly differentiated from cinema or YouTube, however, goes without explanation. A conventional expectation might be that the art form has a shorter duration, but there are about seven and a half hours of footage to see by 10 artists at "What We See," and, unfortunately, little of it truly excites.
On the opening day, the catalog was unavailable and so little context was apparent, except a brief write-up on the museum's website announcing banalities about our so-called era of technological revolution and unprecedented hyperbolic daily change. Technologically inundated, the line between truth and fiction, it alleges, is blurred, and the artists in the exhibition are to make us wonder about the "whereabouts of truth."