‘Disappearances – an eternal journey’ by Shinji Turner-Yamamoto – read here.

“Turner-Yamamoto’s installation comprised fossil materials – 400 million year old CORAL collected during a recent artist residency at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, LIMESTONE (fossil rock in which the shells of sea dwellers are cemented in a solid mass, the CONCRETE floor of the exhibition space created from burnt limestone), and GYPSUM (deposits formed by ancient lake and sea water and collected by the artist and SiTE:LAB team from Grand Rapid’s gypsum mine) to comment on the ubiquity of fossil material in our everyday life—from the oil, coal, and gas we use when we drive, heat our homes, or cook.”

Before he laughed himself to death after painting a funny old woman, Zeuxis is said to have lost a competition with his fellow painter Parrhasius to see who the greater artist was. While he unveiled a painting of grapes so lifelike that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them, Parrhasius won when he fooled Zeuxis about the very existence of his painting: he portrayed a curtain so realistically that Zeuxis tried to push it aside. Exclaiming that he himself had managed merely to deceive the birds while Parrhasius had deceived the artist, Zeuxis conceded defeat.

That was in 5BC, but images still have the capacity to outwit the eye as a critical organ. The Yokohama-based sister/brother duo Yuka and Kentaro Shimura, aka SHIMURABROS., are driven by a desire to get behind and beyond the illusory two-dimensional surfaces of images. Their recent solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto, Film Without Film, presented four examples from their diverse ten-year collaborative practice, including their acclaimed X-ray Train (2008) (below). With a series of computer-controlled medical CT scans and special liquid crystal film depicting a locomotive engine in transit, the work is self-consciously entwined with the history of the moving image and carries with it essential questions regarding the relationship between image and reality.

The most obvious historical reference here is of course the popular legend about the group of Parisians being struck by panic in 1895 during the world’s first film screening – the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (‘The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station’) – when they believed the steam locomotive on the screen was actually coming right at them. Unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by the new motion pictures, the audience perceived the image as existing in space and were suitably incredulous and terrified.

Whether or not this actually happened, it is interesting that it was also in 1895 that the German physicist William Roentgens would stumble upon his breakthrough discovery of the X-ray and publish his paper Über eine neue Art von Strahlen, outlining the New Kind Of Ray that would allow us to see through opaque surfaces. A hundred and fifteen years down the track (so to speak), SHIMURABROS. have traced these two instances with their X-ray Train where the film’s projected light probes a series of screens and achieves the appearance of mass, inviting viewers to navigate their way around a moving image and experience it as a form with not just width and breadth but also depth.

The blurring of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality is also the basis of the duo’s new photographic sculpture works on show, Roppongi and Nihombashi (2010) (above). Here the artists scanned the roads of select districts in Tokyo on Google Maps Street View and located several gaps ­– blurred lines that can be located on Street View all around the world, wherever the computer-generated photograph is partially incomplete. They then cast these sections of the road in fibre-reinforced plastic and mounted them so the digital images, including their erroneous creases, become materialised as something that straddles the image/object divide.

Part of the ongoing project to stretch images beyond the limitations of the screen’s flat surface, an earlier video installation, SEKILALA – uncovered family (2006-2008) (above), was also included in the exhibition. Here, a family drama is played out with multiple vantage points as figures appear on three screens in close proximity, facing each other but unable to touch each other. Things seem to them to be within reach, yet as with the grapes and curtains of our antiquity painters, any attempt to grasp hold of them is in vain. This work extends not only the conventional spacial limitations of film, but also the temporal ones. As with the automated, authorless images of Google Maps, the editing of the images here is not conscious, and thus the stories that emerge cannot be predicted. With 26 scenes of varying durations played out randomly, an infinite narrative unfolds of its own accord, and this strategy of indifference raises the question of whether editing without intentionality can still be considered editing.

The rendering of film as form takes a different manifestation in Film Without Film (2010) (above), the exhibition’s titular work. Presented as a response to Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov and his pioneering theories of montage and creative geography, the work gives volume to cinematic images with the application of 3D printer technology. According to the Kuleshov Effect, the assemblage of the images in a film carries more meaning than their content, and while the original found footage used for his Film Without Film experiment is lost, SHIMURABROS. used the surviving text to re-enact it with fragmentary scenes borrowed from notable historical films that were set in Kyoto and are available on public domain. With the light from these films transformed into steel figures and mounted on a clear acrylic base representing a reel, this is evidently film without film but also film about film, a metacinema that has its own layered history wound through it and foregrounded as its raison d’être.

PHOTOS OF X-RAY TRAIN AT THE 2010 BIG IN JAPAN EVENT …

Top images courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery. Big In Japan installation photos by Amelia Groom.

Concerning himself with the body and its institutionalisation, Taiyo Kimura is the proud owner of a humour that is as black as a burnt slab of tar painted in shoe polish at midnight. Suggesting we sit on children, kick babies and roll boxes on pigeon heads, his art is equal parts discomforting and delightful …

“Some person has remarked that the stones placed and the sceneries made by man can never excel the landscape in nature. Nevertheless, visiting through many provinces I have noted on several occasions that when I was deeply impressed by the excellence of a certain scenic beauty, I also found some worthless views existing close by such renowned scenery. In the case of a man-made landscape garden, since only the attractive and best parts of the places are studied and modeled after, meaningless stones and features are seldom provided along with man’s work.”

The Japanese word for ‘nature’, shizen, means literally ‘self made’, and while he doesn’t tell us his criteria for judging a view as worthless or a stone as meaningless, the author of the eleventh century Japanese manuscript Sakuteiki: Memoranda on Garden Making (attributed to Tachibana-no-Toshitsuna) suggests here that rational man is a better artist than fortuitous nature because he has the capacity for editing.

We can turn here to Sen no Rikyū, who is credited with founding the chanoyu Japanese tea ceremony in the sixteenth century, and the popular anecdote about his preparation for receiving the powerful warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi. The story goes that Hideyoshi had heard of the wonders of Rikyū’s garden of morning glories and expressed desire to see it, but when he arrived he found that Rikyū had clipped and thrown away all but one of the rare ephemeral blossoms, in order to concentrate its singular beauty. This is nature intervened around the edges in order to select and accentuate, marking a deep affection for self-made nature as well as a triumph of human construct over the way it presents its self. By sacrificing all his flowers for the one, Rikyū framed the natural so as to focus our perception of it and pay tribute to it, while at the same time to interpret, integrate, codify and control it.

For the latest exhibition at Mori Museum in Tokyo, Sensing Nature, three contemporary artists – Yoshioka Tokujin, Shinoda Taro and Kuribayashi Takashi – presented works around the theme of Rethinking the Japanese Perception of Nature. The irony of its being situated on the 52nd floor of a Tokyo skyscraper was not lost with Kuribayashi’s Wald aus Wald (Forest from Forest), which used Japanese paper, a material that comes from trees, to build seemingly weightless papier mâché trees that were elevated from the ground and only visible through several individual manholes. Straddling subterranean and aboveground realms, the work invited visitors to penetrate its floor-ceiling so they were at once inside and outside, above and below. Fascinated by their capacity for existing both on land and under water, Kuribayashi has used images of seals and penguins recurrently in his past work, and this new installation turns to trees, things that extend both upwards and into the ground, to build on his examination of borders, boundaries, surfaces and in-between spaces.

As part of the Sensing Nature exhibition the museum also set up the Nature Book Lounge, with hundreds of children’s picture books, glossy art books, natural science and astronomy textbooks, novels, garden design manuals, scholarly theses and ancient manuscripts looking at nature and man’s relationships to it …

Third image: Kuribayashi Takashi, Wald aus Wald (Forest from Forest), 2010, photo by Osamu Watanabe, courtesy of Mori Art Museum. Other photos by Amelia Groom.

After studying under Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake, Tokujin Yoshioka established his own office in 2000, focusing on spacial and product design. A large scale recreation of a window he did for Miyake’s Snow collection in 1997 is currently on show at Mori Art Museum for their Sensing Nature exhibition. Comprising nothing but electric fans and hundreds of kilograms of white feathers, which Tokujin considers ‘the lightest material available to us’, the work is the result of the designer’s ongoing fascination with the threshold between visible and invisible. Also on show is a series of watery benches made from an incredibly clear glass that is used in optical lenses and space shuttles (the same material Tokujin used for his Chair that Disappears in the Rain, a public work in Roppongi), and his pure mineral crystal that was induced to grow over 12 months …

Second photo courtesy Mori Art Museum, others by Amelia Groom:

1 & 2 “Snow” 2010 (1997-), 3 “Water Block” 2002, 4 “The Light” 2009.

Since the mid-90s Aichi-based artist Takefumi Ichikawa has worked with ephemeral media like sound, air, incense and milk in his performances and installations around the world. His recent work Aurora, a labyrinthine painting-sculpture incorporating floating fabric and bare light bulbs, is currently on show on the top floor of the abandoned Mansho-S Building in Nagoya’s shopping district Choja-machi, as part of the Aichi Triennale.

Our earth and our bodies both comprise of roughly seventy per cent H2O, but water is one of the most elusive things in all physical existence. Colourless, odourless, tasteless and transparent, the only form it takes is that of its container. It drips, seeps, flows, incorporates, evaporates, and in the case of the ocean it shifts continually with the motions of the moon, as does the human fertility cycle. If ever it is deprived of movement water quickly protests with the stench of stagnancy.

Modelled on a single drop of water, a new museum by Ryue Nishizawa of the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize winning duo SANAA opened last week on the small, remote island of Teshima in Japan’s Inland Sea. Nestled amongst recently rejuvenated rice paddies, the discreet concrete shell structure will permanently house a delicate and fluid new site-specific work by artist Rei Naito.

“Every project is like creating a baby,” Nishizawa said to me outside his newborn on the day of opening. “When buildings are new they are shiny, embodiments of pure potential. As they grow they lose that shininess but gain character and maturity, and we can’t foresee what they will become.”

In theory, concrete, like water, can take any form. But this unprecedentedly thin, unsupported shell marks a true structural feat that was only achieved with the help of leading engineer Matsuro Sasaki who used advanced software to develop a formula for the shape, which was then realised by Kajima Corporation.

The result is a cornerless configuration that feels at once enveloping and open. Distances and boundaries are made unclear as the gently curved surface overrides the orienting and delimiting functions of the rectilinear. Angles keep vastness at bay, while in domed spaces like this feelings of the infinite are indulged.

Two large openings in the shell provide continual airflow and natural light, with the sun’s illumination projected in two circles on the floor. Looking out at the sea, sky and surrounding vegetation framed by these apertures we might also recall the traditional Japanese shakkei (”borrowed scenery”) garden that is characterised by the incorporation of prescribed distant views as part of the design.

As with all Nishizawa’s work, interior space is opened onto exterior space to the point where the boundary between the two dissolves. The constant movements of nature – including climatic, diurnal and seasonal cycles – are all featured as part of the architecture, which exists harmoniously within the undulating landforms of its surrounds.

The site marks the fourth major museum to be commissioned by The Fukutake Art Museum Foundation on the Inland Sea, as part of billionaire philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake’s vision for rejuvenating the largely abandoned region with cutting edge architecture and art. At the opening he said that the commission was not for a museum that would be independent of the art it houses or the natural surrounds that house it, but for a site where art, architecture and environment would coexist.

When Nishizawa and Naito first came together for the commission neither the art nor the building were decided, so both elements evolved simultaneously out of a long process of dialogue between artist and architect, both of whom also wanted to engage with the island’s natural terrain and its history. They were conscious, for example, of the fact that despite having been an illegal dumping ground for industrial waste for sixteen years, Teshima maintained rich natural resources including clean spring water and fertile ground for rice cultivation – although this background seems to be an excessively literal way of thinking about the subtle and powerful work that resulted from the collaboration.

If the building is unobtrusive in the surrounding landscape, the art inside it is barely even visible. Upon entering the cavernous space the first impression is one of complete emptiness, until it becomes apparent that tiny holes at your feet are giving birth to ever evolving liquid bodies that seem to be alive, travelling along the specially treated ground of their own accord, breaking off, amalgamating, fluxing and refluxing before disappearing again into the floor.

Always moving and never repeating the same arrangements, the clear drops of pure local water offer fleeting reflections of the sky or surrounding greenery as they pass you by. The movements of the air are also made visible by two fine floating ribbons at the apertures. Containing nothing but moving water and moving air, the space itself seems to be living and breathing.

Having set out to create a work that would reflect the continuity of life and be completely unprotected from nature, Naito described her process to me as more akin to searching than creating. She worked largely without any plan, accepting everything that the open space and her materials of water and air proposed. In her own modest words, “any beauty in the work is already happening all the time out there in the world; the work’s beauty doesn’t belong to the artist but to nature, it was already there.”

Photos by Noboru Morikawa

Shadows exist on surfaces as pure image without detail, colour or mass. Immaterial, elusive and ungraspable, they were mistrusted by Plato as representing fraudulent imitations of reality, distractions from truth and knowledge. To be liberated, the prisoners in his cave would have to come outside and face the fully dimensioned world of sunlight – the opposite of darkness, the antithesis of deception. But actually light and dark exist only in and through each other – a shadow needs a source of light from which to be cast and stars cannot be seen in the day because only darkness gives form to light. Arlo Guthrie said in a few words what Samuel Todes and others have said in many: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in”.

For Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent installation at Gallery αM in Tokyo, the Osaka-born Berlin-based artist likened the configuration of the basement gallery space to those enclosed subterranean realms never reached by daylight, caves. With this as his starting point, he created an interwoven, participatory system of shadows, lights, found domestic junk precariously arranged, and ongoing photo documentation. It seemed to extend in several directions from Tu m’ (1918), where some of Duchamp’s icons – the wheel and hatstand – were used to “do a painting with cast shadow” by way of exploring the relationship between two dimensionality and three dimensionality, image and thing.

Plato thought the light of the sun was the ultimate, unpolluted truth and anything else was secondary, but as this exhibition showed, the relationship between light and authenticity is more conflicted than we might assume. The nature of light is such that it can be propagated through projection and reflection endlessly without suffering any loss to the source. The moon, for example has no light of its own; its illumination is a forgery, borrowed from the sun. In the intricately built space the illegitimate shadows of Plato’s cave became their own authentic fakes, independent of sunlight and indifferent to the notion of originality.

The title of the show, Cave, was projected near the entrance to the gallery via a methodically placed hand-mirror that picked up light from outside the room. Second-hand light was also recorded live by camcorder and transmitted to a projector which then cast the shadow of a representation of a horse from the Lascaux complex of caves (estimated to be 17,000 years old) via a page from a second-hand book of reproductions. Sources of origin were consciously made indistinguishable from the interacting forms of reproduction.

As with the young artist’s other recent performative installations, a camera sat on a tripod for the duration of the show silently working away at time-lapse documentation of the perpetually incomplete set-up. The thousands of photographic images will later be compiled in an autonomous stop-motion video work, forming yet another layer of representation. Besides the common analogy of photography and shadows (dating way back Fox Talbot who described the first photographic images as skiagraphy, meaning ‘shadow writing’), the camera’s presence brought to mind Susan Sontag’s statement that the power of photography has “de-Platonized our understanding of reality”, making it no longer plausible to distinguish between images and objects, shadows and realities, copies and originals.

In one corner of Taguchi’s cave the passing of time was documented by the shifting shadows of a tall, single stem pink tiger lily that stood in an emptied wine bottle on the floor before a spot light. On the first day of the exhibition the artist traced the cast silhouette of the freshly cut flower on the wall in pencil, and over the weeks that followed the growing distance between these marks and those of the real live shadows made evident the drooping flowers’ more salubrious past, as well as their imminent extinction. It was a simple gesture of marking duration, and death, through the interplay of artist’s impression of shadows and ‘original’ shadows.

While at first glance it appeared to be a cacophonous and arbitrary arrangement, the evolving space was executed with great skill, exactitude and wit. As with any visual trace of a shadow, what it amounted to was a representation of a representation, but under Taguchi’s apt hands the reconfiguration of time, layering of shadows and interweaving of copies ensured any pretence of originality (the sun) was eclipsed.

Photographs by Amelia Groom

By commissioning seven contemporary architects from Japan to create museum installations, the organizers of this new show at Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art found themselves facing the question of where, rather than what, this thing we call architecture is. Fittingly, they gave the exhibition the title Where is Architecture? Seven Installations by Japanese Architects.

Atelier Bow-Wow’s anonymous animal forms made from intersecting arches came as a response to the observation that while there’s no sign prohibiting them from doing so, visitors to the museum always avoided walking on front lawn. They wanted to create a welcoming meeting space at this museum entrance that would be connected to the city life and natural surrounds. The museum’s closest metro station is Takebashi, which literally means ‘bamboo bridge’, so for this project, titled Rendez-vous, the architects turned to the material of untreated bamboo, loved for its flexibility, strength and capacity to create semi-transparent spaces of overlapping lines where light and shadow interact.

Once inside the museum, the first work we encounter is a paper structure by Ryuji Nakamura that appears to have massive volume without any weight. Comprising 10000 tiny pillars composed in triangular prisms, Cornfield is arranged so that the internal patterns evolve continuously as you navigate your way around it, and its entirety cannot be seen at one time.

In the next room is Hiroshi Naito’s Red Stripes work, comprising two hundred laser beams projected on the floor of an otherwise pitch-black room (see here). The exploration of the architecture of light continues with Hiroshi Kikuchi’s work one day in a room, where a small model of a room rotates around a fixed source of light, simulating the earth’s relentless twenty-four hour diurnal cycle and showing how built spaces change constantly with the configuration of light.

The exhibition culminates with inside in, a survey of Toyo Ito’s pioneering work with materials and form, presented in a beehive-like matrix of interconnected polyhedrons reminiscent of his plans for the Toyo Ito Architecture Musuem, scheduled to open in Imabari in 2011. Modeled on fractured crystals, the geometric spaces are devoid of right angles or corners for things to hide in, giving a feeling of coinciding enclosure and openness.

‘Red Stripes’ image courtesy of the exhibition’s Flickr page (photo by Ano Saici, JunJunSCIENCE performance), other photos by Amelia Groom

Apparently crystal formation of frozen vapour (snow) is under-researched. Some of the most valuable observations were done in the 1930s by the Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya (above), who turned his attention to the study of snow crystals after experiencing difficulty finding work in the field of nuclear physics. He was the first to grow artificial snow crystals under controlled conditions, and was also pioneering in snow crystal classification. His beautiful 1954 publication Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial contains the bulk of his research.

Fast forward a few decades and it makes some sense that the scientist’s daughter Fujiko Nakaya has developed a long-term relationship with artificial fog. Living in New York in the 1960s Nakaya mingled with the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group before going on to create ‘the world’s first fog sculpture’ at the 1970 Osaka International Fair. Since then she has worked with the opaque but intangible medium of fog for installations, sculptures and performances around the world, including major commissions at the Australian National Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She is also credited with opening Video Gallery SCAN, Japan’s first media art gallery, in Harajuku in the 80s, and she has organised biannual TV/video festivals in Tokyo for many years.

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” (Roland Barthes)

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Faraday Cage is currently ticking away in the old Power House on Cockatoo Island – the former convict prison and dockyard for shipbuilding in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Following on from his recent experiments with electricity, the new site-specific commission is a clear highlight of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

The artist had been working with early William Henry Fox Talbot negatives, buying as many as he could and making his own positive images with them, true to the original techniques. This Photogenic Drawing project then led to the Lightning Fields body of work, where he applies electric charges directly on to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The resulting formations rely on chance and suspend the electric charges in time as still images.

For this ode to Michael Faraday, a pioneer of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, a series of light-box mounted prints from the Lightning Fields series line a staircase where visitors ascend towards a thirteenth-century sculpture of the fierce Raijin, the Japanese God of Thunder. Nestled amongst the beautiful, dusty and redundant machinery the artist had added an apparatus that gives off intermittent volts of electricity, adding an element of shocking sound that makes the silence in between all the more eerie.

Sydneysiders were also fortunate enough to have Sugimono give the Biennale keynote opening address. He spoke about his extensive background as a collector and dealer in Japanese and Asian antiquities as being driven by an unshakable desire to “see with ancient eyes”. He also outlined his recent architectural work for the Izu Photo Museum at the foothills of Mt Fuji in Japan, and his building plans for a theatre space at a nearby mountain. So is he becoming less interested in photography? The performing arts are a natural progression from the medium, he said, theatre is much closer to photography than painting.

Soap bubbles, inflatable alter egos and crystal baubles all feature amongst the handful of artists representing Japan in the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, currently showing at GOMA in Brisbane.

A rising star of contemporary Japanese art, Shinji Ohmaki has two standout works featured – Liminal Air, an immersive and highly tactile environment of clever artificial light and thousands of knotted white cords suspended at various heights (second image below); and the dramatic Memorial Rebirth, which comprises 50 bubble machines blowing 10,000 bubbles a minute into the sky (last image below). Like all his work, they are based on notions of infinity and the transience of all things, relating back to traditional Japanese aesthetics with motifs of repetition, emptiness, ephemerality and ambiguity.

One of the most photographed works in the show is PixCell-Elk#2, a 2.5 metre high taxidermied elk covered in glass, acrylic and crystal baubles of various sizes by Kohei Nawa (fourth image below, detail above), a sculptor who is primarily interested in the interaction between form and surface, and how we come to understand what we see.

Examining our relationships with material objects in the virtual/digital realm, PixCell-Elk#2 is part of Nawa’s ongoing ‘PixCell’ series whereby he creates sculptures based on images returned from web search engines. His objects (such as taxidermied animals) are sourced from online auction sites before being enveloped in skins of glass beads which resemble computer pixels as well as molecular structures, magnifying and distorting the object’s form in different parts to various degrees.

The most famous of the Japanese artists included is the superflat illustrator and sculpture Yoshitomo Nara, who has a specially commissioned joint collaboration with the Osaka-based architecture and design firm graf featured. Using reclaimed timbers and found materials, the YNG (Yoshitomo Nara Graf) space houses a selection of Nara’s iconic child-like drawings and objects (third image below).

Also of note is a multichannel video installation from animation and film artist Hiraki Sawa (in collaboration with sound artist Dale Berning) that was commissioned for APT (fifth image below), and an extensive retrospective of director, actor, author, comedian, artist and cult television personality Takeshi Kitano’s directorial film work (first image below).

By no means a broad look at what is happening in contemporary Japanese art, the five Japanese artists here (situated amongst a total of over 100 artists from Asian countries in APT6) are well worth devoting some time to if you are going to be in Brisbane between now until April 2010.

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Images: 1. Kohei Nawa / Japan b.1975 / PixCell-Elk#2 (detail) 2009 / Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermės / Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo / Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga. 2. Production still from Kantoku: Banzai! (Glory to the Filmmaker) 2007 / Director: Takeshi Kitano / 35mm, colour and black and white, Dolby Digital, 108 minutes, Japan, Japanese (English subtitles) / Image courtesy: Celluloid Dreams. 3.Shinji Ohmaki / Japan b. 1971 /Liminal Air – Descend – 2007 – 09 / Installation at: APT6 / Courtesy: The artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP. 4. YNG (Yoshitomo Nara and graf) / Y.N.G.M.S. (Y.N.G’s mobile studio) (detail) 2009 / Commissioned for APT6 and the Queensland Art Gallery Collection with assistance from Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo / Purchased 2009 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. 5. Kohei Nawa / Japan b.1975 / PixCell-Elk#2 2009 / Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermės / Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo / Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga. 6. Hiraki Sawa / O 2009 / Commissioned for APT6 / Courtesy: The artist, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. 7. Shinji Ohmaki / Japan b. 1971 / Memorial rebirth 2008 / Installation at: APT6 / Courtesy: The artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP

Fellow Osakans Tomoko Inagaki and Takuma Uematsu first paired up on the occasion of a group exhibition called I meet … , which showcased various artist collaborations. They hadn’t initially intended to form a unit, but the experience of working together was so rewarding that they decided to join artistic forces, under the moniker Ine wo Ueru hito (meaning “person who plants rice” and incorporating both their names INagaki and UEmatsu).

“The concept of Ine wo Ueru hito is to remove ego and think beyond ourselves,” the artists say. “Usually artists work and think individually. We are both also individual artists and think individually, but in this unit we try to produce work by thinking about and caring for the other. We don’t fight and cherish the process of making the works peacefully.”

Their first collaborative works One day, I meet… Parts 1 + 2 were exhibited in Tokyo at HPGRP Gallery and Nadiff last month, and from next week they will be shown at Spooky Action at a Distance, the Big In Japan exhibition of Japanese video art opening at Black & Blue Gallery on December 4 from 6pm. Combining sculpture, illustration and performance, the two part video is teeming with visual trickery, reconfigured animals and the strangely comforting relentless mundanely of vacuuming.

When Yukihiro Taguchi (aka Yuki) started out exhibiting installation work, he found himself compelled to alter and evolve the arrangements continually for the duration of his shows. He then realised that his photographic documentation of the changes had a particular interest of their own, and that led to his current practice of performative installation.

Elaborate rearrangements of things are documented by thousands of pictures taken on stop-motion, thereby forming endless reconfigurations of space and time. For his recent exhibition at his Tokyo gallery Mujin-to Productions, Yuki conducted one of his ‘performative sketches’ from the other side of the world. Every nook and cranny of the tiny room (tiny even by Tokyo standards) was covered with his idiosyncratic drawings, including new ones which were sent to the gallery by fax daily from the artist’s base in Berlin. The process was documented by a camera set on automatic in the room, and the images taken will form a video work at a later date.

Other recent projects have applied a similar concept to outdoor public spaces (which Yuki says is much easier to do in Berlin, where the regulation of city space is infinitely more lax than it is in Japan). His acclaimed Moment series, for example, saw him take the wooden boards from a gallery floor and place them in endlessly evolving configurations all over the city – with the third and most recent volume in the series completed in Rio de Janeiro.

While the artist is never seen in the works, his presence is always evident. It is physically demanding stuff, requiring weeks or sometimes months of consistent manual labour and patience. But the results are fascinating, always forcing us to reconsider our relationships to our surroundings.

Yuki recalls that when he returned the floorboards to the gallery floor after taking them away on various adventures for four weeks, the residents of the building and anyone who had visited the installation during the project felt that the boards seemed strangely unnatural back in their original context, as if being removed from their location and function had fundamentally altered them. He took this as confirmation that new relationships with our daily landscapes and material surrounds can and should be explored.

Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent ‘performative sketch’ installation at Mujin-to in Tokyo.

In an earlier series of works, Yuki held gatherings in bubbles and documented their slow deflation.

Floor boards sneaking away and getting up to mischief around Berlin.

With new energy and expression being granted to everyday things like floors, furniture and air, the allure of Yuki’s work is that of the ancient art form of puppetry; making the inanimate animate and creating life from lifelessness.

Yukihiro Taguchi is one of seven Japanese artists to have video work included in Spooky Action at a Distance, opening at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney at 6pm on December 4, and running until December 19.

Bringing together two of Japan’s most visionary and free spirited women, an installation from SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima for Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

The spacial design by Sejima is reminiscent of the instillation that was held at SCAF Gallery in Sydney earlier this year, but the experience of the curved and subtly reflective space with Rei Kawakubo’s extraordinary shapes and colours floating throughout is overwhelmingly beautiful. The clothes cease to exist as individual garments and become unified as parts of one work, the full effect of which is best experienced from above, on ether side of the museum’s upper level.

The show makes evident many similarities between the architect and the designer; while Kawakubo shocked the fashion world in the 80s when she presented collections that showed complete disregard for things as fundamental to fashion as finished seams and hems, Sejima is well known for radically reconsidering accepted notions of space and built environments, also demanding thought and participation from anyone who experiences her work.

Separate to the installation there is a section dedicated to the artful interplay between two dimensionality and three dimensionality in Kawakubo’s work. Displaying garments on mannequins alongside photographs of the same garments removed from the body and laid flat, viewers can see how the clothes completely change form when they are on the body. The are virtually unrecognisable in the photographs, reminding us how closely aligned Kawakubo’s work is to the realms of sculpture and architecture.

The special exhibition is part of a larger fashion show at MOT from Kyoto Costume Institute called Luxury Reconsidered. Looking at society’s changing ideas about the meaning and purpose of luxury in fashion, it examines different cultural and historical perspectives including ostentatious luxury, the luxury of simplicity and more personal or intellectual luxury (which is where Comme des Garçons fits in). The exhibition continues until January 2010.

Photos by Amelia Groom

Exhibit A is a moss and indigo artwork at the Shibuya Tokyo Wonder Site café that has been gradually evolving for the last eight months. The artist Takashi Kuribayashi worked with his collective Coceworks and the indigo dyeing art duo Litmus to set it up, and its ongoing transformation is documented via video footage and photographs inside the café, as well as in the blogosphere. The project is part of the Tokyo Wonder Site environmental project series, and several events and workshops are scheduled to coincide.

But now for a compulsory montage glance over Kuribayashi’s more general awesomeness. Besides moss and ferns his other running motifs are seals and penguins, which he often uses in latex form for his instillations where audiences are invited to peer through walls or ceilings into fragments of alternative aquatic worlds. With his childlike sense of wonder and silliness he achieves a supreme quality of tranquillity in his work, which is always refreshingly free of cynicism.

On the rooftop of an abandoned school near the flashing lights and madness of Tokyo’s Akihabara Electric Town, there is a nightly happening comprising kinetic sculpture, balloons, instrumental inventions, light, sound and performance art.

Without chronology, centre or climax the series of improvisations unfold as the sun goes down and a harmonious atmosphere envelops all. Rest-ful Musical Devices is a part of Ensembles, an initiative by avant-garde musician Otomo Yoshihide which is taking place in various venues around Tokyo. Thinking about the highly individualised way people listen to music today, with earphone straight on eardrum, Otomo wanted to focus on making sound within space, emphasising the interactive and social dimensions of music.

The line up includes some of Japan’s most interesting performers and experimental sound artists: Atsuhiro Ito, Fuyuki Yamakawa, Yuko Mohri, Sachiko M, Tetsuya Umeda and Kanta Horio. A pretty special evening if you’re in Tokyo any time between now and November 3.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

Ceramics is one of the oldest art forms in Japan. Since the 4th century it was often highly influenced by Chinese aesthetics and techniques, but the Japanese came to develop a distinct style of unglazed high-fired stoneware that embraced varied tones and textures rather than striving for the high-glaze perfection of Chinese porcelain. This rustic appeal of the Japanese ceramics has become one of the defining examples of the wabi-sabi philosophy that locates beauty in the humble, irregular, impermanent and incomplete, striving to resemble the harmony of things in nature.

Now in his seventies, Kosho Ito was trained in traditional Japanese ceramics and seamlessly took his knowledge and skill into an experimental art practice. He is well known for his large-scale installations that comprise many small clay formations composed as a whole on the gallery floor. Mirroring elemental life forms like cocoons, seeds or primal organisms, the individual pieces are always similar, but no two are ever the same.

Working only with his hands, the artist’s focus in on the raw material. He tries to minimize the effect of human intervention by following what the clay wants to do, and as a result the shapes appear to have developed through their own natural processes. Meticulously arranged together, the final compositions are often mandala-like in their circular forms and temporality.

A major retrospective, Kosho Ito Works 1974-2009 – Order and Chaos, was recently held at the Museum of Contemporary At Tokyo, focusing on how Ito’s work has always shown that chaos exists inherently in order, and vice versa.

[Images: 1. Folds of Clay – Blue Freeze, 2007. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Yoshitaka Uchida. 2. Instillation photo from Kosho Ito Works 1974-2009 – Order and Chaos, Museum Contemporar Art, Tokyo. 3. Kino-Niku, Tsuchi-no-Ha, 1991. Courtesy Takamatsu City Museum of Art. Photo: Yoshitaka Uchida. 4. Kino-Niku, Tsuchi-no-Ha II, 1993. Courtesy Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. Photo: Yoshitaka Uchida. 5. Eros of Alumina (White Solidities are...), 1984. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Photo: Yoshitaka Uchida. 6. Feldspar Terrain No.2 (Imported Soil Series), 2000. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tadasu Yamamoto. 7. Instillation photo from Kosho Ito Works 1974-2009 – Order and Chaos, Museum Contemporar Art, Tokyo. 8. Portrait of Kosho Ito.]

Tatzu Nishi’s homes are finished! The instillations I wrote about several weeks ago are about to open to the public, and the artist will be discussing his work in a free public talk at the AGNSW on October 2 from 1-2.30pm. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is also holding a solo show for him from October 3–24 so we can all get totally Tatzud out.

Photos by Amelia Groom

Chu Enoki’s first public performance was a Naked Happening in 1970 which involved him walking through the middle of a main street in Tokyo with the Expo ‘70 logo sunburned onto his bare chest, by way of protesting the huge heavily branded event that was taking place in Japan at the time.

A performance work based on the simple idea of going about his everyday live for four years with one side of his head and body entirely removed of hair, Shaving Half of My Hair took place between 1977 and 1981. Around the same time he started In Everyday Life Multi, whereby he converted his private home into a public domain, inviting anyone to come and see his art and his domestic life; and for his Bar Rose Chu work in 1979 he transformed a gallery space into an intimate bar where he interacted with guests as a moustached hostess in drag.

Such public interventions as these sought to shake up the divides between public and private spaces, art and the every day, spectatorship and participation. In more recent years the artist has moved away from body and performance based works towards sculpture and instillation that utilise found objects and materials including weaponry, ammunition and industrial detritus. His RPM-1200, pictured below, saw a sci-fi city skyline emerge out of highly polished junk metal and old drill bits.

For more on Chu Enoki see his website or get hold of the book Everyday Life/Art: Chu Enoki.

Why bring art to the home when you can bring home to the art? Two new homes are currently being constructed outside the Art Gallery of NSW, swallowing up Gilbert Bayes’ monumental bronze equestrian statues. When they open up at the start of next month visitors will be able to enter via a ramp into a cosy bedroom or living room – perfectly reconstructed with windows, carpets and furnishings – with the larger-than-life hoarse and rider structures protruding out of the floor or bed.

The project is the latest from Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi who has been building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights for over a decade. A temporary woman’s boudoir enclosing the statue on the roof of the Hermès flagship store in Tokyo; a studio apartment atop a 14th-century cathedral in Basel, incorporating its bronze angel as the centrepiece of the living room table, and a hotel room built around Picasso’s iconic Femme au fichu bleu within the gallery space are a few examples of his past work. By incorporating familiar, pre-existing structures and images into temporary, intimate domains he literally recontextualises them, forcing us to reconsider the public/private divide.

The War and peace and in between constructions open on October 2 at the AGNSW to coincide with a major retrospective being held there of John Kaldor’s ambitious public art commissions, which started 40 years ago when he invited Christo and Jeanne-Claude to come to Australia and wrap Little Bay in canvas. Since then Kaldor has instigated many seminal public art projects, including Gilbert & George’s Singing Sculpture in 1973, Jeff Koons’ Puppy in 1995, Bill Viola’s video instillations in a Redfern church last year, and now the wonderful Tatzu Nishi.

When I first met Namaiki three years ago, it was in the basement of their Tokyo club, Superdeluxe. As sound waves reverberated around the room in time with dancing visuals across all four walls, we maintained a heated discussion about combination planting mushrooms.

Namaiki are graphic designers, club owners, music fiends and arguably the original Guerilla Gardeners. Their work around Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Europe ranges from high tech campaigns for massive brands to beautiful little green pockets. Perhaps my favourite is their ongoing project, Kinky Muff Land, which began at graf building in Osaka now appears in fifth generation form at the Jogja National Museum, Indonesia.

The use of local fruit trees, compost, bamboo and the odd rabbit in the installation reflects Namaiki’s ongoing mission to inject a heap of greenery into our aesthetic existence. By including wonderful, nourishing things in their curated gardens, Namaiki detach themselves from the frequently inward-looking world of art to create something that educates and exists simply for the rest of us.

Kenji Yanobe’s plastic, metal and steel sculptures embody the same industrial-futuristic aesthetic that sends Japanese consumers (and quite frankly, the rest of us) into a spending frenzy. Yet Kenji’s mission is much darker than the likes of Bearbrick or Mr TTT: all of the artist’s creations are built from a nuclear holocaust. Not however, the one that affected Japan 20 years before his birth, but one that continues to radiate from television screens all over the country.

Much of Kenji’s work is made with reference to the otaku generation; kids whose worlds are saturated in comics, television and robotics. Such mediums are of course entertainment, but their stories are frequently concerned with the darker side of human existence; one that denies its humanity in favour of power. In such media, the machine straddles both sides of the divide, as both a human ally and destructor.

Growing up with this kind of stimulus, Kenji’s 3D works are at once cute and chilling. For his current exhibition at bld gallery in Tokyo, Kenji has created an installation of Mini Toyarans, based on his iconic Giant Toyaran sculpture. Part man, part child and dressed in a nuclear suit, Toyaran is modelled on a ventriloquist’s dummy used by Kenji’s father. Running until August 9, the exhibition features a legion of Mini Toyaran. This small army might stand at 10% of the size of their predecessor, but they are 100% as fascinating (and frightening!).

]]> http://biginjapan.com.au/2009/07/giant-mini-toyaran/feed/ 0 http://biginjapan.com.au/2009/06/paramodel/ http://biginjapan.com.au/2009/06/paramodel/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:23:08 +0000 angela http://biginjapan.com.au/?p=144 sarariimen at a sushi bar, obachan scrubbing down in onsens and kawaii kids galore in a school gym [read more]]]>

From para-para-manga flip books, tracks running in parallel, paradoxes, childlike paradises and pla-model miniature worlds, Paramodel springs.

Made up of two geeky-looking guys from Eastern Osaka, Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano, their art installations are like dioramas gone wild; with electric blue plastic railway worlds, biddy mountain goats and mini-lorries snuggling alongside sarariimen at a sushi bar, obachan scrubbing down in onsens and kawaii kids galore in a school gym.

There’s a healthy dose of ‘play’ in all they do, but the effect is seriously hypnotic, and the execution complex. Their latest step has been finding the spiritual in sewage pipes, as they twist the traditional art of ema in weird and whimsical paintscapes.