Yokoo in Wonderland
Japan
Kobe
2023
19
Yokoo in Wonderland invites visitors into artist Yokoo Tadanori’s parallel realm, where the boundaries of reality dissolve into a collection of wonders. Drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, the exhibition guides viewers through a journey that begins with a girl falling into an underground kingdom, then continues into space and an unknown world. The experience progresses through “The Looking-Glass World,” where real and virtual images intertwine, and concludes in “The Land of Dreams,” blurring reality and unreality. Through Yokoo’s distinctive artistic vision, this exhibition encourages a deep immersion into an infinitely expanding universe, prompting reflection on how art can transport and reshape our perception of the world.
Why should you watch this?
The film Yokoo in Wonderland resonates now because it stages how our sense of reality unravels and reforms under technological and social pressure. Yokoo’s Alice-like girl — leaping down a hole into an underground kingdom, surfacing beneath seas and in orbit — models curiosity as a way to face dizzying image worlds. The mirror passage, where reflections splice with virtual figures, feels eerily topical in an era of screens and layered identities. The work unsettles and thrills, alternating moments of childlike astonishment with sudden dislocation. Its lasting charge is both simple and urgent: openness to strangeness sharpens perception, and imagination becomes a civic skill for living together.