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A Record of Failure — A Mirror of the Time

Social Educational Experiment, 2010–2018

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In 2010, the artist initiated an educational experiment after recognizing the repetitive and standardized nature of classroom teaching and the lack of opportunities for creative experience within the school system. The project was designed around immersive learning through play and making, combined with collaborative structures that encouraged students to build and assemble large-scale objects together.

Students constructed structures such as houses and airplanes by dividing the work into individual parts and later assembling them collectively. Through this process, they experienced the meaning of collaboration and the sense of achievement that emerges when a group accomplishes something impossible for an individual.

The program quickly spread across elementary and middle schools and received strong support from both teachers and students. The structures created by the students were not confined to the classroom; they were also exhibited in public spaces such as subway stations and municipal buildings, allowing the wider community to encounter the outcomes of the project.

Some programs expanded further into civic participation projects. In these cases, students investigated safety issues in their neighborhoods and requested meetings with local authorities, presenting proposals for improvements. Other initiatives included community mural projects and collaborative environmental activities.

The experiment continued for approximately eight years. Hundreds of instructors participated, and the programs were implemented in schools across multiple regions. More than 8,000 program reports and extensive video archives remain from this period.

However, after 2017 the political and cultural administrative environment surrounding public education programs changed significantly. As a result, the project lost the institutional conditions that had allowed it to operate and was forced to stop. The experiment came to an end in 2018 while still at the height of its activity.

The artist records this experience not simply as a personal failure but as a reflection of the structural conditions of the time in which he lived. The project remains as an example of how artistic practice can expand into social experimentation—and how such attempts may ultimately be halted by the larger systems of power and administration that surround them.

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There are artists who seek new modes of existence for art—
ways that can contribute to human life and thought.

Through education, they imagine the social evolution of art.
Through the management of a social enterprise, they put it into practice.

They believe that everyone has something they can do well.
And that what can be done well can always be done better.

Based on this belief, they design interdisciplinary art education—
operating learning environments both inside and outside schools,
and continuing research without pause.

Between government and the public sphere,
they identify what can be done,
and act with autonomy.

They believe that finding better ways
and resolving discomfort together
is the fastest path to change.

This is how we draw on the canvas of the world.

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