SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER

SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER
2023
Single channel video (loop), cigarettes with offset print
Variable size

En route to his year-long study in Paris, Yamaguchi had his lighter confiscated at Shanghai Airport. This incident prompted him to establish a personal rule: “not to buy a lighter for a year.”

In Paris, where smoking is commonplace, he continued an experiment of borrowing fire from others whenever he needed to smoke, attempting to create chance encounters in a foreign land. The work’s title stands in opposition to the warning messages on cigarette packages—”SMOKING KILLS” and “SMOKERS DIE YOUNGER.” However, this practice, initiated to facilitate connections with others, gradually became a source of stress, leading to the project’s eventual abandonment.

At the end of his year in Paris, his professor, French artist Claude Closky, gave him two lighter artworks created 24 years prior.

*Lighters gifted by Claude Closky (‘Burn Out’, 2000, lighter; ‘Smoke More’, 2000, lighter)