It felt entirely appropriate to see “Time To Die”— Joep van Liefland’s first solo exhibition in Japan—on Halloween. As evening fell, the Blade Runner-esque streets around Nanzuka Gallery began to seethe with a human froth of staggering zombies, gibbering corpses, and wounded cosplay nurses. Despite their macabre costumes, the crowds of young people gathering in Shibuya were abuzz with youth and happiness; death never seemed more vital. A similar paradox was at work in van Liefland’s show. In a hipsterish version of the Day of Judgment, dead video formats were resurrected and celebrated: cabinet installations displayed battered satellite dishes, coiled SCART cables, assorted ugly remote controls, and spools of outmoded ferrous tape. Mounted on pegboard were stickers for half-forgotten electronics brands, prosthetic limbs, bionic skulls, generic batteries, faded adverts for once-futuristic formats. Beginning with the collage Untitled (Theology of technology 7) (2015)—a juxtaposition of images of color wheels, space tech, classical Greek statuary, and mineralogy—the exhibition led into what appeared to be a 1980s video repair shop, but on closer inspection turned out to be an assemblage of installations featuring remote controls in a light box. Here—thinking of the protests that greeted Omer Fast’s recent exhibition “August” at James Cohan Gallery—I began …