The eye is an orb, an aquatic jewel with an aqueous humor lens.

The earth is an orb, an aquatic jewel washed in oceanic tides.

Between these two watery spheres, we place another: an aquatic jewel of glass.

Connected right behind your eyeballs, your brain generates consciousness. Through the watery spheres of your eyes, your consciousness projects upon the world as its screen.

This installation is modelled after your relationship to the world. The world just happens to be around.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2011

A special exhibition from Hiroshi Sugimoto at the 2011 Yokohama Triennale has his optical glass sculpture Five Elements (2011) erected between our watery eyeballs and his seascape photograph Lake Superior, Cascade River (1995).

Also on display here are meteorites, including this fine specimen that was one of several meteoric iron fragments discovered in 1838 in modern day Namibia. Nearly solid iron with minute traces of other elements, these would in the mid-twentieth century help to accurately establish the age of the universe (4.5 billion years) in accordance with the Big Bang Theory.

In the last room is the same pairing of Sugimoto’s electricity-photography experiments with the thirteenth-century sculpture of the Japanese god of thunder that I wrote about for the Sydney Biennale last year. As part of the Yokohama Triennale, the photographer / antique dealer / curator – who is now turning his hand at sculpture, architecture and traditional Japanese performing arts – also directed a Bunraku production and designed the sets for a Noh performance.

Sugimoto’s movements across and between temporalities including pre-modern Japan, the global contemporary and the pre-historic cosmos indicate a continuous exploration of continuity, and an approach to history and time as, to borrow Michel Serres’ handkerchief analogy (in Conversations on Science, Culture and Time), “folded and crumpled” rather than “flat and ironed out”.

I’m under elevated train tracks in Yokohama’s Koganecho district, barely sheltered from a passing typhoon. The wind is loud and warm, the sky looks low enough to touch. My pen is broken, my feet are soggy and the air smells deliciously of carpentry. This is where Kato Tsubasa is building the base of his latest plywood structure, a replica of the lighthouse that was lost at Fukushima in the March disasters.

Tsubasa has over the last decade been constructing to-scale replicas of buildings and rooms for his ‘pulling down works’ where he gathers groups of people to, well, pull down the works. See video documentation here. What interests him is the collective thinking and manual labour required for these simple de-structive accomplishments that are too big for one man.

The artist conceived of this new work while he was making regular trips to Fukushima after the nuclear blast, as a volunteer to help sort and clear the detritus. With his assistant Yukari Hirano (also a chef, carpenter and chiropractor), he will relocate to Fukushima at the end of this month to finish the tower using wood gathered from the debris there. The plan is then to engage the local communities to pull the lighthouse up – a communal act of ‘pulling up’ rather than the ‘pulling down’ Tsubasa has become known for, which he hopes will offer a sense of physical union and symbolic regeneration.

Photos by Amelia Groom

]]> http://biginjapan.com.au/2011/09/strings-attached/feed/ 0 http://biginjapan.com.au/2011/09/the-music-of-the-spheres/ http://biginjapan.com.au/2011/09/the-music-of-the-spheres/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:56:26 +0000 amelia groom http://biginjapan.com.au/?p=5477 read more]]]>

“I can play your profile … I wonder how your nose will sound.” (László Moholy-Nagy)

Shrewd new sound sculpture by rising star Lyota Yagi. You can see+hear them in revolutionary action here. Balls of cassette on modified cassette players. Yagi’s work often brings him back to the tangibility of analog sound technologies: I included his melting ice ‘vinyl’ records in last year’s Big In Japan exhibitions in Australia, and since then he has also located audio information in the microgrooves of human fingerprints. The Sound Spheres were recently included in a group show in Budapest, where Yagi made this eight minute video condensing seven days.

And, here’s what Wikipedia has on the Musica Universalis:

The Music of the Spheres incorporates the metaphysical principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or ‘tones’ of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion. Pythagoras first identified that the pitch of a musical note is in proportion to the length of the string that produces it, and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios.

In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.

In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, also influenced by arguments in Ptolemy’s Optics and Harmonica, compiled his Harmonices Mundi (’Harmony of the World’), which presented his own analysis of optical perceptions, geometrical shapes, musical consonances and planetary harmonies. According to Kepler, the connection between geometry (and sacred geometry), cosmology, astrology, harmonics, and music is through musica universalis.

Some recent botanical sculpture by rock-star-turned-haute-couture florist Azuma Makoto. Nadia Saccardo interviewed him for Big in Japan in 2009 …

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know.” - Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD)

Fascinated by the decay and deformation of a stack of cardboard boxes that were left under his house, Hitoshi Nomura was struck by the idea that “there are forms that exist independently of intention.” For his graduation work at Kyoto City University of Arts in 1969 he exhibited a precarious twenty-six-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes that collapsed over several days under the indifferent hands of time, gravity and the weather. Naming the anti-monumental auto-destructing apparatus Tardiology, he consciously went against sculpture’s conventional pretensions of solidity and permanence.

In the years that followed, his work moved increasingly away from sculpture to root itself in photography, though he insists that his photographs are in fact sculptural because they are always the result of “movement in real space.” Nomura’s photography is essentially a means by which to document duration, disintegration, progression and transience. But from its beginning photography has had a complicated relationship with time – conceived of by Fox Talbot as “the art of fixing a shadow,” it entails the fleeting being firmly secured on a surface, the transitory being rendered immutable, the instant continuing into the future.

The marking of time in Nomura’s works over the last four decades has often taken him a lot of time to execute. In 1972 he embarked on a humble little project to “photograph ever visible thing.” For ten years he documented mundane scenes from his immediate surrounds with time-lapse sequential photography, finally publishing all the images in one hundred and twenty bound volumes. Referencing Brownian Motion – the seemingly random, erratic movements of particles suspended in water – he named the disjointed series of images The Brownian Motion of Eyesight.

The result of non-discriminatory obsessive compulsion, the catalogued photographs were supposed to “make clear the nature of the act of seeing,” but the most successful outcome of the project, it seems, is that it failed. The artist recalls he “eventually came to understand that a human being cannot photograph everything and that there is a limit to seeing.” This realisation coincided with Nomura turning his lens towards the sky: “Not everything one sees can be photographed,” he decided, “but it is possible to capture everything in a day by representing a day with the sun and moon.”

From this point on Nomura gets cosmic. I wrote last week about his Moon Scores, which like all his work came from this desire to find form that exists independently of the artist’s intention. Another stellar project is his The Sun on Latitude 35° N (1982–87), whereby he recorded the sun’s diurnal progress across the sky from a fixed position, using a fish-eye lens. With the curves of light signaling a single day, he made one of these images for every day in the earth’s cycle around the sun (aka a year). If the sun’s form was occluded by inclemency he would have to wait for the same day the following year. When he finally had 365 ‘days’ he lined up the curves, which varied according to the time of year, and was amazed to find this formation that swirls tightly through summer and winter, and stretches out at the intersecting lines of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Another accidental encounter with the formation of celestial rhythm came out of Nomura’s Analemma series (see below). An analemma (from the Greek for ‘pedestal of a sundial’) is a form traced by an extraterrestrial body (in this case the sun) from a fixed position on earth at regular intervals over a calendar year. Nomura explains it by saying that if human perception was imbued with the ability to maintain an afterimage for a year, this is the image we would see in the sky. Remarkably, as with his Sun on Latitude 35° N, the inadvertant resulting figure resembles our symbol for infinity.

In one of her more poetic moments, Susan Sontag equated looking at photographs with stargazing: “the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” (On Photography). She was referring to the photographic image as being a material vestige of a now absent subject, but this is also a reminder that due to the fact that light (the medium of sight) has a speed (which happens to be the fastest speed at which anything can travel in the universe), we can all see the past. Looking into the night sky, we see images that are extremely old – stars as they were millions of years ago, which may well by now no longer exist, and yet their scintillating image remains in our present. This is the basis of Nomura’s recent Time and Distance series, where he placed photographs of light that was emitted from the Milky Way a hundred and fifty million years ago, next to Jurassic fossils of plants that lived on earth at the same time – thereby reuniting contemporary relics of primordial time and space.

All Nomura Hitoshi quotes are from the catalogue for his solo exhibition Perceptions-Changes in Time and Field at the National Art Centre, Tokyo, 2009.

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 …

Yokohama-based artist Tsuyoshi Anzai assigns pointless new tasks to generic domestic commodities. For his Stop-MAKE-ing-Machine series, monotonous semi-anthropomorphic movements are imposed on assemblages of household junk in decidedly non-glamorous grey-carpeted interiors …

The prolific artist/designer/researcher Yasuhiro Suzuki’s recent works have included a boat resembling a zipper tab and a bowl made in the image of a cabbage. Having presented new projects at Tokyo Design Tide and Axis Gallery earlier this month, he stopped off in Australia as our guest to install his subtle kinetic work Aerial Beings at the Big In Japan events in Sydney and Melbourne.

Freed from gravity’s pull, these transparent human-shaped helium-filled PVC balloons drifted through space of their own accord, making visible the constant movements of air that usually go unseen. Each one assembled by hand with over 100 pattern templates seamlessly pieced together, the lighter-than-air sculptures were first shown last year as part of an art program themed around air at Haneda Airport.

Like his dynamic breathing mannequins made of monofilament fibre, the Aerial Beings are part of Yasuhiro’s ongoing exploration of air, new materials, the human form and the ambiguous boundaries between animate and inanimate. Optional further reading: For some thoughtful thoughts on air go here and for a most excellent history of balloons in art there is an article at the most excellent Cabinet Magazine.

Sounds are invisible vibrations travelling through space that may be heard if they reach an ear. Lyota Yagi makes his sounds temporarily tangible by taking silicon casts from his favourite records, filling them with water, and freezing them. These frosty ‘vinyls’ hold entire compositions that proceed to melt into puddles, the music gradually becoming audibly and materially degraded.

In contrast to rock star guitar smashing or George Maciunas’ Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, these works are founded on a premise of self-destruction, where they fall victim to the natural law of entropy – the second property of thermodynamics which states that all energy is eventually neutralized.

Lyota’s video work Time Cosmique documents several of these ephemeral sonic sculptures as well as select other projects, and will be presented as part of the curated video art component of our Big In Japan events this month. Crossing multiple disciplines of sculpture, interactive installation, performance and video, the artist’s previous works have continued similar themes of sound in relation to time and space, and often returned to the revolving form of the vinyl record …

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.

Screens have the unlikely duel function of both concealing and revealing. According to Steven Connor, “A screen filters; it is a permeable membrane, not a locked door. Screens cover and conceal: but in presenting a secondary or fictitious surface, they also partially disclose.”

Entwining themselves in the history of images and cinema, the Yokohama-based sister/brother duo SHIMURABROS. are concerned with extending the screen beyond its limitations of two-dimensionality. Probing surfaces with projected light that is given the appearance of mass, their X-ray Train invites audiences to navigate their way around a moving image and experience it in an entirely new way, as a sculptural form.

One major invention in the history of moving images that SHIMURABROS. are referencing here is chronophotography (from the Greek chronos and photography, ‘pictures of time’), an important precursor to cinematography. The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey is attributed with inventing the first form of sequence photography that involved the release of a shutter at regular intervals, furthering his studies of movement – particularly that of human bodies and animals.

In 1872 a Californian businessman and racehorse owner hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle the question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during gallop. When Muybridge came up with a single image showing a racehorse airborne in the midst of a gallop, it was an instance of photography being used to render visible what was previously invisible. Nobody before this had seen a horse thus suspended in the air and the image became a new model for equestrian painters: more than a tool for recording what we saw, the camera was coming to be treated as a means for capturing what we couldn’t perceive with the naked eye.

According to popular legend, in 1895 a group of Parisians were struck by panic 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 a steam locomotive on the screen was actually coming right at them. Unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by motion pictures, they were suitably incredulous and terrified.

Meanwhile that same year 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 surfaces. A hundred and fifteen years down the track (so to speak) SHIMURABROS. have traced these two instances with their X-ray Train, made from medical CT scans and special liquid crystal film. With a series of computer-controlled screens giving the illusion of a locomotive engine in transit, the work continues the exploration of these essential questions about the relationship between image and reality.

Yuka and Kentaro Shimura received the Excellence prize at the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival 2009 and their work Sekilala is currently on show at PICA in Perth. Their solo exhibition Film Without Film has just opened at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto, and they will be travelling to Moscow for another exhibition before stopping in Sydney and Melbourne for our Big In Japan! events this November, marking the first time their X-ray Train has been shown in Australia.

The colour of slime and texture of animal, Mitsuru Katsumoto’s green can take many forms. Invasive but contained, it appears out of cracks, inside things, between layers – its hue always invariable and indifferent…

Photographs by Bunsei Matsuura

Twenty two Takashi Murakami works have just gone on show at le château de Versailles and a throng of Frenchies are protesting, even though there is no trace of Murakami’s explicit works there and they could be at home reading this month’s Pop Magazine, which the Japanese pop artist collaborated on with pop star Britney Spears. Shall we let them eat cake?

When Newton looked in his prism he decided white light was a composite of all colours, rather than a pure, uniform substance. He used the word spectrum (from spectre, ‘to look’) to characterize his rainbow of seven colours, and proposed that colour was not an inherent property of matter but an illusion arising from human visual apparatuses in accordance with light emissions. But this didn’t float Goethe’s boat at all – he rejected Newton’s science where all matter was reduced to greyness and colour was only in the mind, and he set about resorting colour to the external world.

Whether colour exists in our heads or in things, there is a lot of it going on in Murayama Ryriko’s hanging fabric sculptures. Thousands of pieces of chemically died silk are painstakingly stitched together by the artist, forming a stained glass window effect where the hues shift under different light conditions. These photos were taken at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa exhibition Shift earlier this year.

If ‘weed’ is a term of categorization applied subjectively to any unwanted plant in a man-made setting then the desirability of Yoshihiro Suda’s weeds makes them inherently oxymoronic. His hyper-realistic wooden carvings appear inconspicuously in forgotten cracks and corners of pristine galleries and museums worldwide, each one made site-specifically with close study of weeds commonly found in the area. The Japanese word for nature, shizen, means literally ‘self created’ and while Suda’s tiny sculptures resemble nature to perfection, they are far from self created. Using traditional Japanese woodcarving tools and techniques, a single leaf can take him many days to complete. We might think of this as the ultimate weed control, because rather than joining the futile battle to eradicate unwanted plants it simply renders them obedient, infertile, static and beautiful.

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.

Modernism’s doctrine of functionalism put the ornamental in a corner and spat at it, but apparently the decorative is making a quiet comeback. The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo recently brought together ten contemporary Japanese artists under the idea of Neo-Ornamentalism, for an exhibition that had echoes of Buddhist sand mandalas – with Motoi Yamamoto’s temporary 12 by 15 metre ‘salt painting’ on the museum’s floor (below) – as well as European rococo and the repetitive patterns of Islamic arts.

Image credits: 1. Katsuyo AOKI, Predictive dream Ⅸ, 2009, Private collection, Courtesy of Röntogenwerke. 2. Motoi YAMAMOTO, Labyrinth, Installation view at Force of Nature, Artist in Residence, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, U.S.A. 2006, Salt. 3. Atsuo OGAWA, cutter knife skating, 2009, Engraving on soap. 4. Tomoko SHIOYASU, Cutting Insights, 2008, Paper, TAKAHASHI COLLECTION, Courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Photo by Keizo Kioku. 5. Hiroshi MIZUTA, An apartment in gray, 2009, Oil on canvas, Artist’s collection, Courtesy　of　ARTCOURT Gallery. 6. Junichi MORI, minawa, 2008, Wood, Courtesy of void+. 7. Kentaro YOKOUCHI, book-tear, 2008, Dye and medium, satin, Collection of Museum Contemporary Art Tokyo.

The prolific director / actor / film editor / stand-up comedian / TV presenter / author / poet / painter / sculptor / videogame designer / general no good layabout Beat Takeshi Kitano has taken over the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Described as a “series of dreams”, the show comprises games, inventions, alternative scientific theories, a puppet theatre, paintings, objects and videos in a temporary space designed for the young and young at heart.

In Australia there is currently a retrospective of Kitano’s films for APT6 at GOMA in Brisbane, and his biggest blockbuster Zatôichi is featured at the AGNSW’s current program of Japanese films.

Images courtesy Fondation Cartier

Some samples of Akihiko Amano’s work, which according to the artist is about looking at the art of language, and the language of art. His recent solo exhibition 918 at Magical Artroom in Tokyo presented several ink and acrylic paintings depicting his own invented alphabet, described as an attempt to to explore the perceived impossibility of escaping language, even in abstract art.

Akihiko now also has his recent sculptures on show at Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo – alongside the work of Kuribara Morimoto – as part of the latest in the Imaginary Museum of the O-Collection: Magical Museum Tour series (see first image below).

Granting public access to the extensive private collection of the Magical Artroom Director Satoshi Okada, the O-Collection series makes evident the patron’s unique eye for new developments in contemporary art, and his unwavering dedication to supporting young Japanese artists at the very early stages of their careers.

A cave-like structure that appears both open and closed, rough and smooth, heavy and floating, the onishimaki + hyakudayuki space currently open at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo changes its form dramatically as you navigate through and around it.

At just 26 and 27 years old, this up-and-coming duo have been getting a lot of attention for their proposals of architectural spaces that trigger real physical sensations. Situated in the Museum’s Media Court space (which is open to the public free of change), this recent commission responds to the angular grey concrete austerity of its surrounds while seeming to have landed there from another dimension entirely.

Continuing until January next year, the display marks the fourth in The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s MOT × Bloomberg Public ‘Space’ Projects, an initiative aimed at supporting young artists and expanding public access to art.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

Just as King Arthur’s round table went against hierarchical structure by abolishing the notion of the head of the table and ensuring everyone who sat there had equal status, SANAA’s building for the The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa uses the form of the circle to create an integrated, community-oriented centre for contemporary art; one with flexible spacial definition, multiple points of access and a focus on inclusively and participation.

When I wrote about SANAA several months ago during their exhibition in Sydney, I mentioned how their work prefers gradual curvature over dividing walls and corners, synthesises interior and exterior spaces, and emphases transparency, reflections, ambiguity, flexibility and contemplation. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art seems to be the perfect embodiment of all these things – situated in a park in the heart of the city, the transparent glass surface gives a sense of openness and means the interior and some of the artworks are visible from the outside, rather than separated from everyday life. The subtle reflections in the curved glass further integrate the outside into the inside and vice versa – and courtyards and skylights throughout keep visitors connected with the world outside even when they are in the middle of the building.

Anyone can wonder in and hang out in any of the public areas which have lots of seating, and while the temporary exhibitions usually have a fee there are several ‘people’s gallery’ spaces that are open to the public free of charge. There is a well stocked library and magazine reading room free to the public, as well as a children’s play room, a café that stays open into the night, and many public programs.

The art is worthy of note too. A favourite amongst the premanant collection is Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool, which seems perfectly suited to the building with its playful defiance of insideness and outsideness. The perpetual rain (for which Kanazawa is renouned) last weekend had a beautiful and hypnotic effect on the top of the pool from the inside (see below).

Other artists often create site specific works that interact with the building, such as the Tokyo-based Suda Yoshihiro’s easily overlooked Weeds which are incredibly realistic looking fine carved and painted wood sculptures that pop out of cracks in the concrete ground (see below). The temporary exhibitions feature a rotation of exciting names from Japan and abroad, too. I caught the end of the Tadanori Yokoo retrospective and opening at the end of November is a solo show from Olafur Eliasson that will run simultaneously with the survey of his work which is at the MCA in Sydney from December.

Currently celebrating its 5^th year, The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art remains an extraordinary feature of the quiet, remote and inclement town of Kanazawa.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

One of several art spaces that have in recent years started taking advantage of the relatively cheap rent in Tokyo’s garment district, Gallery αM (pronounced ‘alpha em’) is enjoying their new permanent home in the quiet basement space of an old building near Bakurocho Station.

Ran by Musashino Art University, αM is currently celebrating the university’s 80^th anniversary with a yearlong program of exhibitions curated by Kazuo Amano. With 8 shows in total, the series is called Metamorphosis – Objects Today, and it aims to examine the work of contemporary sculpture artists who use or misuse materials in new ways. Whether it is wood, plastic, fabric or found objects, all of the artists in the series are identified as working with innovative transformation of materials and objects.

Currently showing is the fifth volume in the series, with Kyotaro Hakamata’s recent creations using plexiglas and other materials. Next in line will be up-and-comer Teppei Kaneuji, with Kengo Kito and Masanori Handa to follow.

It’s definitely worth checking out this space. In the same building you’ll also find Foli Gallery and Art Eat, a café/gallery that serves organic Lebanese food – and within walking distance are many other interesting new spaces including Cashi Gallery, which opened just over a year ago and uses the freezer of the staff refrigerator as one of the exhibition ‘rooms’.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

What if the Power Rangers reformed as a Japanese hiphop crew with degrees in sculpture? Taku Obata’s new show at Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, It’s Just Begun, suggests the result would be rather awesome.

Obata formed the hiphop group UNITYSELECTIONS (who performed at the exhibition opening on Saturday night) in the late 90s, and since then he has been refining their tongue-almost-in-cheek styles of dance, music, street art and design, in recent years setting up the sister project HIPHOP SENTAI BBOYGER. Meanwhile he also graduated in sculpture at Tokyo National University, and is proving himself to be as skilled with the chisel as he is with the mic.

His background in dance and hiphop has evidently given him great insight into the form of the human body and the way it moves; the wooden sculptures currently on show have a remarkable sense of motion and energy about them.

See more from UNITYSELECTIONS here.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

“Bones are located in the depths. Plastic covers the surface. Whiteness is a common feature that facilitates movement between inside and outside.”

Bones, plastic and whiteness are some of Teppei Kaneuji’s favourite things. Liquid, towers and stains are a few others. The young artist’s work with white resin on everyday plastic commodities relates not only to the whiteness of bones being brought to the outside, but to his fascination with snow. When he started out by covering found objects in white starch powder, he was inspired by how snow can make our familiar surroundings foreign, unifying all things under its blanket and stripping common objects of their meaning and purpose.

Though less well known, his work with paper and collage is equally compelling. An accidental coffee stain on a page was the catalyst for his Muddy Stream from Mug collage series: as a triumph over the mishap he cut out more stains on paper and composed them in meticulous and systematic ways, thereby making them no longer accidents. These then became sculptural paper works, going from 3D liquid to 2D stains on paper, and then back to three dimensions in a new solid form.

In a similar vein, his collages and sculptures comprising cut-outs of moisturiser and other liquid substances from magazine advertisements also confuse two dimensionality and three dimensionality – just as his assemblages with white resin (applied as liquid which then sets) appear like either frozen icicles or melting drops; once again somewhere in between liquid and solid.

His exhibition Melting City / Empty Forest at Yokohama Museum of Art earlier this year made him the youngest artist the Museum has featured in a solo show to date, and since then he has been in high demand. Now for the first time a taste of his work has arrived in Australia, with a series of drawings and a video instillation (above) at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Go check it out, I have an inkling we’ll be seeing a lot more from Teppei in the years to come.

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.

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.

My how the world would be dull without magnetic fields. No microphones, no rockets, no doorbells, no compasses, no cassettes, no credit cards, no magnet space wheels, no passive aggressive fridge notes between housemates, and no liquid magnetic art from Sachiko Kodama.

After graduating in physics, Kodama went on to study computer and holography art for her doctorate. She is now associate professor at University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. These pulsating sculptures are the result of her ongoing experiments with ferrofluid, a magnetic liguid that was invented in the late ‘60s by NASA. The mesmerising Morpho Towers: Two Standing Spirals came from a collaborative project with Yasushi Miyajima, who created the musical score the forms are dancing to.

Kodama says that while these works were created with state-of-the art electromagnetic technology, they are inspired by natural phenomena like the ocean, tornados, plant life, sea urchins and rhythms of breath. She imagines that in the future, artificial intelligence may be applied to such materials and techniques as hers, and “if this becomes reality, computers that mimic natural forms may offer a more calm, relaxing and comfortable user experience.”

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!).

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