City to City 2021 Piece “The Portal” Exhibited at Sapporo Parallel Museum 2023
A recurring event, the Sapporo Parallel Museum is part of a project to create a bustling new urban centre and to promote Sapporo (UNESCO Creative City since Nov 2013) to the world as a hub of media arts. Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative began in 2021, aiming to reaffirm the value of art by looking at the uncertain present from multiple perspectives. Accessible from anywhere in the world, it shows work not only onsite at physical locations around central Sapporo Ekimae Street, but also online, where the pieces are specially dedicated to the virtual space.
At the same time as the city’s most prominent event the Sapporo Snow Festival, the latest edition of the Parallel Museum took place from the 4th – 12th Feb 2023. A total of seven pieces of art were displayed around the city centre, one of which being The Portal created by artists Miyuki Oka, Mauricio Diaz (Santiago de Cali), and Yilin Wang (Changsha) for the City to City 2021: Play! initiative. The audiovisual AR feature integrates motifs that represent Japanese, Colombian, and Chinese culture and was formed in an online collaboration over a period of three months.
There were around 13,000 visitors to the exhibition in total, many of which stopped by The Portal as the bold, moving images caught their eye.
