„New Nasubi Gallery“ (milk box) project by Tsuyoshi Ozawa 1998 
 - Sculpture Wood - Japan

For sale is a sculpture/installation (unique) by the German-Polish artist Sebastian Bieniek (born 1975), which is part of the project “New Nasubi Gallery” (milk box) initiated by the Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa, created in 1998 and depicted in photos 1 to 4. Additional photos provide supplementary information about the project and the artist.

Milk Boxes of the “New Nasubi Gallery” have been auctioned several times in Japan over the last decade, achieving prices of around $2,000 (USD).
“New Nasubi Gallery” is certainly a well-known and prestigious project of “modern Japanese art,” and Sebastian Bieniek is a well-known German-Polish artist.

The object is not easy to categorize in several respects, since it simultaneously is an installation, sculpture, object, conceptual art, and even “a mobile gallery.” On the other hand, it is simultaneously a project by Tsuyoshi Ozawa and a work of art by Sebastian Bieniek. Moreover, it is part of the well-documented and canonized Japanese contemporary art and at the same time a work by the young Sebastian Bieniek at the time.

The auction winner will receive a certificate of authenticity issued in his name by the artist.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa at the time invited several artists to design a Milk Box. The collection of the resulting artworks in a Milk Box he named “New Nasubi Gallery.”
The project drew attention in the late 1990s as it represented a newly emerging form of art presentation and art gallery.

The boxes have been shown in many prestigious exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale (KW Institute for Contemporary Art), CAPC Musée d'art contemporain (Bordeaux), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (part of the Museum of Modern Art New York), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and many more.

The Berlin-based artist Sebastian Bieniek, born in 1975, created one of these Milk Boxes at the request of the Asian Fine Art Gallery (now Alexander Ochs Private). He lived together with and shared a studio (in the then-famous Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin) with the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, hence the connection to Japanese artists. The Milk Box designed by Bieniek is offered here for sale. It is a handmade unique piece.

Technical specifications:
Size: 35 x 15 x 20 cm.
Material: wood, photographs and playing cards.
Signed on the back.
Year: 1998

This is an early work of the then 22-year-old artist. Yet the fundamental motifs—an interplay of “game” and “life/reality” and the resulting fracture—are already visible and have consistently characterized the artist’s work.

About the artist:

The German conceptual artist, painter and photographer Sebastian Bieniek (born 1975) is regarded as one of the most radical boundary-crossers of the contemporary art scene. His entire oeuvre has been a permanent, provocative dance on the razor-thin line between reality and illusion.

Born in Upper Silesia, Bieniek moved to Germany in 1989 as a late resettler and began his artistic path at the Braunschweig University of Art. There he studied Free Art under the extreme influence of the world-renowned performance pioneer Marina Abramović and the Swiss conceptual artist John M. Armleder. Later he switched to the Berlin University of the Arts, where he completed his studies as a Meisterschüler, while also pursuing a directing studies at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. His career began in the late 1990s at the legendary Berlin art house Tacheles, from which he quickly established himself as a major figure. In 2013 he achieved international breakthrough with the viral photo series Doublefaced, after which renowned magazines named him one of the most influential artists in Berlin.

Early in his career, Bieniek stood out with actions that unsettled the audience and the conventional art world. Inspired by the bodily limit experiences of his mentor Abramović, he used his own body as material and, in an early work, cut a new wound into his arm daily for days to physically document impermanence. In addition to these painful processes, he staged disturbing social experiments in public spaces by laying out long stretches of barrier tape without permission to block subway entrances or squares in Berlin. This demonstrated how blindly people obey visual and state authority. With his 2011 book Realfake, he expanded these experiments into the digital realm: by creating dozens of fake profiles, he deliberately manipulated algorithms, media, and public perception—long before the phenomenon of “Alternative Facts” reached world politics.

The absolute and most radical culmination of this interdisciplinary work was the staging of his own death as a final art performance. Bieniek, who decades ago dissected the mechanisms of media impact, digital identity, and deception, extended this principle to the ultimate boundary of human existence. He forged and orchestrated reports about his own death and accompanied this with conceptual video messages like his Apology for being dead, thereby shocking the art world and the public into a state of suspension. With this act he pushed beyond what any artist had done before. He no longer used just canvas, camera, or the living body, but raised total disappearance, play with the afterlife, and the ensuing media hysteria to the actual art form. Bieniek thereby proved once and for all that in the age of digital networks even the boundary between life and death is manipulable, moldable, and ultimately part of a hyperreal staging.