Festive opening
SOLUBLE MEAT
Annet Gelink Gallery is pleased to present Soluble Meat (2025), the latest video work by Meiro Koizumi, on view in the gallery’s project space, The Bakery. Following his major exhibition at Museum De Pont earlier this year, Koizumi brings to Amsterdam a new piece that probes the shifting boundaries between human consciousness and machine intelligence.
Koizumi is internationally recognized for his experimental video installations and immersive environments. His practice often explores the tension between private emotion and collective memory, and examines how systems of power—whether political, cultural, or technological—shape the individual. Working across performance, film, and more recently VR and AI, he consistently draws viewers into psychological spaces where fragility, authority, and identity are put to the test.
In Soluble Meat, Koizumi extends this inquiry by engaging artificial intelligence as both tool and subject. The work originates from a late 19th-century Japanese book on hypnosis, which introduced into Japan the latest experimental methods then being developed in the West. Koizumi scanned archival black-and-white images of hypnosis sessions and introduced them into an AI program with the prompt: “This is a tragic film about people who are losing their free will.” Each resulting image was then re-fed into the system at regular intervals, producing a chain of uncanny, dreamlike sequences.
The final video oscillates between recognition and disorientation: familiar gestures and bodies dissolve into strange, shifting forms, echoing the trance state of hypnosis while also reflecting the hallucinatory logic of machine-generated imagery. For the voice-over, Koizumi turned to Google’s Gemini AI, allowing the technology to “speak back” to its own visions. Though the process resembles a stream of automated consciousness, Koizumi stresses the human hand that guides each stage.
By linking hypnosis—an early technique for bypassing conscious control—with the generative potential of contemporary AI, Soluble Meat crystallizes Koizumi’s broader artistic concerns: how forces beyond our grasp, whether psychological, political, or technological, infiltrate and reshape the self. The work resonates with surrealist strategies of automatic writing, while also situating them in a present where the unconscious is mediated not only by memory and imagination, but by algorithms.
Meiro Koizumi (b. 1976) living and working in Yokohama, attended the International Christian University, Tokyo (1995-1999); Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1999-2002) as well as the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2005-2006). The artist has exhibited in major art institutions around the world, such as: De Pont Museum (2025); Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art (2019); Perez Art Museum Miami (2018); MUAC, Mexico City (2015); MOMA, New York (2013). Recent group shows include 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Sharjah Biennale 14 (2018); 12th Shanghai Biennale (2018); The 9th Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane (2018). His works are included in numerous collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York); Tate Gallery (UK); M+ (Hong Kong); Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco); Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); De Hallen Haarlem (The Netherlands); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam). His experimental VR Theater piece “Prometheus Bound” won the Grand Prize in the 24th Art Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival. In 2021, he won Artes Mundi Prize (Cardiff, UK).
images: Meiro Koizumi, Soluble Meat, 2025 (stills from video)
