SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER

Installation view of SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER – a monitor and a small shelf of offset-printed cigarettes on the wall of a bright exhibition room
SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER – close-up of the video monitor beside the cigarette packs printed for the work

SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER
2023–2024
Single channel video (loop), cigarettes with offset print
Variable size
*Lighters gifted by Claude Closky (‘Burn Out’, 2000, lighter; ‘Smoke More’, 2000, lighter)

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.

SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER – a grid of documentation photographs recording each person who gave the artist a light in Paris
SMOKING HELPS / SMOKERS LIVE LONGER – further documentation photographs of people who lent the artist a light over one year

I landed in Paris where I knew no one.
In this place, I was a foreigner, completely alone.
The fleeting moment when borrowing a lighter and returning it, lasting less than a second.
It’s not exactly a handshake, but I connect momentarily with strangers as if passing a baton.
Just for that instant, I wasn’t alone.

__________Rui Yamaguchi