EXHIBITION

Phoenix Gallery, Exeter

David Blandy's work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life.

Searching for his cultural position in the world, Blandy creates a cast of alter-egos that stem from his passions for kung fu, soul, hip hop and Japanese manga, to ask difficult questions about just how much the self is formed by the mass-media of records, films and television, and whether he has an identity outside that.

Phoenix Gallery is premiering Anjin, a newly commissioned, animated video work conceived as the first part of an episodic series which draws reference from the life of William Adams.

Arriving in 1600, Adams was the first Englishman to reach Japan and immersed himself into this new, sophisticated culture.

He was given the name Anjin-sama – or Pilot – in reference to his navigating skills and was the only westerner to be granted the title of Samurai.

David Blandy re-imagines this tale as an epic space adventure inspired by 1980's Franco-Japanese TV cartoon Ulysses 31 (itself inspired by Homer's Odyssey) in a complex meditation on cultural tourism and identity. T

he powerful video and installation Child of the Atom interjects footage of the artist and his young daughter visiting contemporary Hiroshima, with anime animation of the 1945 atom bomb blast, featuring his eponymous creation.

His journey, in search of their origins, is inspired by a story that contrasts strongly with his lifelong consumption of Japanese pop-cultural and mass-media materials.

"There is a familial myth that my late grandfather would not have survived being a Japanese prisoner of war had the atomic bombing of Hiroshima not occurred.

"So it could be argued that I owe my existence to one of the most terrifying events of human history and the death of 110,000 people," he explains.

The installation displays artefacts, ephemera, novels, comics and toys that examine some of the manifestations of the bombings in global popular culture.

Duels & Dualities: Battle of the Soul, is an arcade game, based on the original Street Fighter game, in which audiences can pit David Blandy's back catalogue of alter-egos against each other in a 2D fighting arena.