” Mineo Aayamaguchi (b.1953 Japan) was one of the few video artists of the 1980s generation to recognise the power of abstract imagery used across a battery of screens in his sculptural multi-monitor video installations . Often his imagery was abstracted from live action, with colour heightened by fragmentation and electronic intensification and movement reflected across screens in linked and mirroring action. The nine screens of Beyond Colour (1986)- across of five screens enclosed in a square of four – were further mirrored in a grid of polished metal sheets laid on the floor; each of the 25 screens of Kaliedoscope (1998) had a metal sheet beneath it – linking the screens together in a field of changing colour. Above all, his is an art of choreography across the multiple image.”
David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. British Film Institute, 2007.

“Beyond Colour. A nine screen, video wall presentation by Mineo Aayamaguchi, ran continually throughout the event. A composed and rythmic flow of images created a sense of harmony as landscape, nature, man-made objects such as digital displays on hi-fi’s and neon lights blended in with close up details of a clothed human body, creating a sense of ‘wholeness’ from formally disparite subjects and objects. Images seemed to flow across the surface of the T.V screens, breaking down the physical frames between image and the medium. On the floor mirrors reflected the images on the screens, broken-up and fragmented out across the space itself and onto that occupied by the viewer.
The work’s overall simplicity had an attraction which became infectious, drawing you back, to witness something different in the overall flow of events on each separate viewing, essential if the works’s full potential was to be experienced and its sculptural quality fully appreciated. Contrasted with many of the other works in the show, this piece was relatively low-tech in its production, relying on compostion of subject matter with the camera and well timed editing, to create many striking and beautiful images. A good example of where simplicity is often the best effect available to put ideas across.

Doug Aubrey, Views from an Electronic Attic, Channel A: Video at the National Review of Live Art, The Third Eye Centre, Glasgow from 5th-9th October. Variant magazine, issue 6.

Charting Time – An exhibition of artists’ drawings, notes and diagrams for film and video, exhibited at Serpentine Gallery, London and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1986. Includes Mineo Aayamaguchi’s ‘Beyond Colour’.pdf here

Drawing by Mineo Aayamaguchi for Beyond Colour, 1989.pdf here

Video Positive ’89 featuring Beyond Colour by Mineo Aayamaguchi .pdf here