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After a few posts about the Arsenale section of the VVenice Biennale of Architecture , let's go straight to the Giardini, the historic exhibition venue which hosts most of the national pavilions.
One of the most popular pavilions this year is probably the Japanese one, surrounded as it is by greenhouses, little wooden benches and tea tables for visitors to have a rest. The pavilion, called Extreme Nature: Landscape of Ambiguous Spaces, is a joint project by ex-SANAA architect Junya Ishigami and star botanist Hideaki Ohba. Its interior is sleek, luminous and looks empty... until you notice the delicate pencil drawings traced on the cream walls. They illustrate an architecture entirely made of natural elements (trees, flowers, other plants, mountains, lakes, etc.). The real nature is just outside the pavilion, in the neatly trimmed garden and inside four vertical greenhouses where Ikebana-inspired garden arrangements grow without air conditioning systems, creating an imperfect artificial environment.
The pavilion spreads outside its walls, its spills in the garden and it's hard to delineate its exact boundaries. There's no dualistic relationship between inside and outside, between architecture and landscape. The furniture which one would expect to find inside a tea room are distributed in the garden. The doors are left open, not even the temperature difference can be used as a factor to differentiate between the inside and the outside. The only structure built specifically for this edition of thee architecture biennale are the delicate and transparent greenhouses and they are not located inside the pavilion either.
The Japanese Pavilion itself is made to appear as an artificial environment or an element of topography. The original outdoor space overlaps with the space that emerges between the ephemeral steel structures covered with glass, causing the appearance of a doubled, ambiguous space. The condition of space produced here makes us aware that everything in it - the plants inside and outside, the furniture, the architecture, the topography, and the environment - exists simultaneously. Previous works by young Ishigami show a similar attention for the smooth blending of nature and architecture. A spectacular example of that practice is the KAIT Studio designed earlier this year for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology. Slideshow of the pictures i took at the Japanese pavilion last week: Source for images 1 and 3. The Venice Biennale of Architecture continues until Nov. 23, 2008. |
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I made it just on time to see the last day of Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan, an exhibition that closed a few days ago at the International center of photography in Manhattan. The work of the 13 Japanese artists on show visits three main themes. The one i found most fascinating and probably also most Japanese investigates the tension between individual expression and collective identity in contemporary Japan.
She might not be as beautiful as Cindy Sherman but that doesn't prevent Tomoko Sawada to create compelling images. Her "School Days" series shows groups of girls in their high school uniforms lined up in neat rows. At first sight, they are all different. But a closer watch reveals that each of the girl (including the teacher's) has the face of Sawada who with subtlety varies her smile, adds an accessory in her hair, stands with an arrogant stance or adopts a demure posture. What was a sweet and innocent school portraits turns into a satire of Japan's homogeneity and emphasis on conformity (interview of the artist on Pingmag.)
Hiroh Kikai's portraits also talk about individuality. Since 1973 the photographer has roamed the Asakusa district of Tokyo, looking for people whom he defines as having a 'take my picture please' aura. So far he has collected 600 b&w portraits of strangers posing against the blank walls of the Sensoji Temple. Most of the people he selected seem to be ordinary. Yet, there is something definitely unconventional about each of them (more images).
We knew about Masayuki Yoshinaga's portraits of goth-lolitas but the photographer also spent 7 years making portraits of Bōsōzoku, the teenage biker gangs, often linked to the Yakuza. A former member of the Bosozoku himself, Yoshinga managed to get access to their activities and had the gang pose for him.
A second theme in the exhibition examines the relationship of the adult to the child, a key subject in a country facing a rapidly graying demographic.
The installation Blue Cinema in the Woods centers on a child-size movie theater set on the back of an elephant. Outside the theater stands a ventriloquist's dummy called Torayan, who appears frequently in Yanobe's work. Torayan is wearing a mini Atom suit ('Atom' comes from the robot character in Osamu Tezuka' s comic book Astro Boy), a child version of the radiation suit that the artist wore in 1997 when he carried out a performance at Chernobyl. In the video shown inside the movie theater, Torayan appears with Yanobe's father, an amateur ventriloquist. Using American civil-defense films of the 1950s, he instructs Torayan about the measures to be taken if atomic disasters were to happen again.
Miwa Yanagi's b&w photo series, "Fairy Tale," consists of reinterpretations of western stories in a very Film Noir fashion. The protagonists are all young girls. The young girls are set upon by nasty old women but they have very little in common with the Disney-like innocence of their age. They put up a fight and prove not so helpless after all. They use their youth and cunning to triumph in rather heartless fashion over their aged tormentors.
The third theme in the exhibition Heavy Light is the conflict between human culture and nature, best exemplified in the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and Naoki Kajitani.
Hatakeyama being so famous, i'll focus on Naoki Kajitani. The young digital street photographer takes his camera primarily in the Kansai region around Osaka, one of the traditional centers of Japan's "low" entertainment culture. Despite of this clear location, Kajitani's photos are 'generic', they represent fragments of the whole country. One which is saturated with garish commercial imagery. His large-scale, Pop-style photographs shows Japan as a cramped environment saturated with noisy billboards, posters, pachinko parlours, power lines, adult shops and advertising displays that appear both playful and sordid.
In an interview for the catalog of the exhibition, the photographer explained that the areas his work focuses on are being redeveloped at a fast pace and are rapidly disappearing. His work might therefore end up becoming a valuable record of the period he is busy portraying. |
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Spaces showing and/or supporting contemporary art which engages with digital and electronic media have started to pop up all over Europe. Very. Slowly.
[plug.in] is one of them but i see at least two reasons that makes [plug.in] stand out from the thin crowd of media art spaces. First, the Basel gallery exists for much longer than most (it opened in 2000). Second, and more interestingly, its programme is one of the most appealing i've ever seen in the field. [plug.in] exhibits and often commissions new internet, sound, interactive and software art; organizes events on media art and digital culture; offers visitor a library and a bar. So far i had been following their programme through the newsletter, but when i read that [plug.in] was hosting the first solo exhibition in Europe of Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, i decided it was high time to go up North and visit the gallery.
The main piece is an installation which unfolds over two floors: UN-DEAD-LINK explores questions of digitized and symbolized death between the physical and virtual world. The audience can see, feel and hear the effects that a symbolic death in a computer game can have in the physical exhibition space.
You're welcome in the gallery by a bunch of objects the artists found on flea markets in Basel. An old sewing machine, a piano, reading lamps, a paper shredder on top of a mountain of paper ribbons, a turntable with a plastic dog sleeping on a spinning disk, an old recorder playing crap music, etc. Each of them is animated by an invisible actor.
Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the game Half-Life2 and connected the mod to the piano upstairs. The electrical objects are connected by midi/dmx (protocol) with custom devices.
The work is extremely uncanny: Seeing and hearing the 'consequences' of a virtual death in the real world gives them a sinister weight. It's more disturbing then seeing a real war massacre on television, probably because today tv death seems almost as virtual as the death of an avatar.
[plug.in] is also showing DanmatsuMouse, a sort of geeky snuff movie in which computer mouses (or should i write 'computer mice'?) are happily destroyed using all sorts of tools on hand: the mouse gets fried in a pan, another one is swirled and crushed in a blender, etc. But something subsists beyond the death of the plastic mouse: its cadaver (a couple of tortured mice were exhibited in the gallery) and the cursor, or rather the data. The motions of the mouse and the cursor were recorded simultaneously by a video camera and a computer programme.
A DVD, available in the gallery space (did i mention that they also have a shop selling artists' editions and electronic gadgets), allows you to play back the sinister event: the movie of the mouse murder unfolds in parallel with the movements of its cursor that takes over the ones of the cursor on your own desktop. exonemo - UN-DEAD-LINK is on view until September 14 at [plug.in] in Basel, Switzerland. Previously on exonemo channel: Interview with Exonemo, MobLab presentation - Transmediale, Origami bus pattern, their installation at Synthetic Times, Ryota Kuwakubo, exonemo and ressentiment in Liverpool, etc. |
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Is there anyone left in this room who doesn't know how much i like Takashi Murakami (and his Kiki character)? Is there anyone who doesn't like his work? Or doesn't like to loathe its shallowness? Now that i'm back in Europe (Yeah!), the usual programme will resume and start with Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. I'm not going to bore everyone with a review of the show, just a few facts i discovered and images you've probably already seen everywhere.
- Murakami's company/factory/collective is called Kaikai Kiki which means elegant or strange or bizarre phenomena. The term was used in the 16th century by critics to describe the work of painter Kanō Eitoku as brave, powerful and yet keenly sensitive. - Kaikai and Kiki are the pink and white stars of a new animation. They travel the world in a living spacecraft, watch as nasty monsters are turned into poop by a mighty princess and learn how to grow watermelons. Trailer: - One of the reasons why Murakami is dubbed "the Japanese Warhol" is because he plays with the idea of blurring the commercial with the artistic. Not that he needs money to pay his rent, his Lonesome Cowboy sculpture recently sold at an auction for $15.1 million, nearly four times its $4 million high estimate. Aaanyway, Murakami did what even Warhol hasn't done: he installed a fully functioning Louis Vuitton shop right inside the museum.
- The artist re-appropriated the LV logo in the painting The World Of Sphere in 2003.
- The 18th century handscroll Compendium of Vegetables and Insects by Itō Jakuchū (detail) inspired the 7 panels of Murakami's catalog of mushrooms. But the mushroom that most troubles Murakami is the atomic one.
- For a guy who siphoned classical painters, Disney characters, mangas and everything in between he is effing obsessed with copy rights.
- Murakami has started making portraits. The museum is showing two paintings of r Bodhidharma, the sixth-century monk credited to have introduced Zen Buddhism to China. There are numerous videos about Murakami on you tube, my favourite so far is this extract of one episode of Ben Lewis' art safari tv series: Followed closely by Jonathan Ross' interview of the artist on Japanorama. The New York Times has more images.
The Takashi Murakami retrospective runs until July 13 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. |
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Notes from the Re-Imagining Asia exhibition at The House of World Cultures in Berlin. The exhibition and other events, curated by Wu Hung and Shaheen Merali, examine how contemporary artists around the world re-invent the image we might have of Asia and the way in which the post-colonial production of knowledge is challenging Euro-centric concepts of art.
Asian art has reached a point where it is almost too hot to handle. New museums and art biennials are popping up all over the continent, the price paid to get a piece of Chinese art are going through the roof and Indian paintings and installations are exhibited all over Europe. Asian art is now so hype that one might think that another exhibition will just kill the enthusiasm. Well, this one won't. The works on show have not been selected for the artists' origins but for their focus on Asia as a space for the imagination. There are Chinese, Indian, Thai and Japanese artists but they are joined by Mexican, Germans and American artists. As you enter the foyer of the House of World Cultures, you meet with Song Dong's installation Waste Not. It is nothing else but his parents' wooden house, which fell victim to urban planning in China. He reconstructed the house together with its entire inventory, a collection of utensils of all kinds accumulated by the artist's mother over a period of 50 years and offering a picture of 50 years of material culture in China. It is hard to imagine how several tv sets, so many kitchen utensils, books, old shoes, toys, buckets, plastic bags, ballpoint pens, cupboards, etc could fit into the tiny dwelling.
Song Dong grew up in Beijing. His mother taught him how to make the most of few resources, recycling, re-allocating and saving utensils for future use. The socialist motto was: 'Waste not'. The shabby borough he lived in has been cleared away for the Olympics a few years ago, but the government neglected to replace the old houses, so there is now an empty area. On it Song Dong would like to build another wooden house in the traditional style as a call for the preservation of old Beijing.
Besides offering visitors a picture of Beijing life, the installation has relieved his mother of the dead weight of half a century and has done so without making her feel that her hoarding was futile. In fact she fulfilled the role of an artist herself by preparing the show. And each of her mundane and utilitarian objects has been elevated to the status of artwork.
Zhang Dali's "A Second History" was probably the work i found most fascinating. It's a collection of copies of Mao-era doctored "official" photographs paired with the unaltered originals.
The work presents an "archive of the Chinese Revolution" in 3 parts: Mao and the Revolution, Heroes and the Masses, People's Pictorial Archive. By presenting side by side unaltered photographies from original negatives and the images as they appeared in the media at the time, the installation shows how deliberate distortion of images became an essential mechanism of photo production, a way to satisfy a yearning for an idealized image and a propaganda tool. Long before the arrival of computer and photoshop. The methods used in the editing of these images involve mainly painting: a wrinkle between Mao's eyebrows vanishes, superfluous figures in the background are erased. (more images of Zhang Dali.) And in no particular order:
The Bohdi Obfuscatus (Space Baby) by Michael Joo embodies perfectly the tensions and harmonies between novelty and tradition. In an homage to Nam June Paik, Joo borrowed a Korean Buddha from a local shrine and encased it in a halo of surveillance cameras, Fiber-optic lights cast projections onto flat TV screens while mirrors, mounted on poles that surround the sculpture, reflect images from the video displays, the Buddha sculpture and visitors as they walk around the installation.
Ujino Muneteru was in the house two. I only got to see the Ozone - So installation, a wooden temple turned into a tank and adorned with waste material, such as electric appliances, plush toys, bits of carpet, building materials and books collected around Tokyo by volunteers.
There was also the video of a musical performance Muneteru gave in Berlin. He played with blenders, hair dryers, parts of bicycles, used vinyl discs, turntables, not only was it fascinating to see him handle all this junk but it also sounded surprisingly good.
Shi Jinsong's razor-sharp line of baby products include a militarized Carriage, a sadistic Cradle and a predatory Walker. Na Zha Baby Boutique (Na Zha is a child warrior deity in Chinese mythology) tries to lure "shoppers" using stainless steel "products" which evoke both luxury and danger.
Bharti Kher's bindi-on-fiberglass elephant. The bindi in India is traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead of men and women and is associated with the Hindu symbol of the 'third eye'. When worn by women in red, the bindi symbolises marriage. In recent times it has become a decorative item, worn by unmarried girls and women of other religions. Bharti Kher covered her sculpture of a dying elephant in white bindi. The elephant is often regarded in Asia as a symbol of dignity, intelligence and strength. Kher marries the elephant and the bindi to contemplate the effects of popular culture, mass media and consumerism on the culture of India.
I took a few pictures. Universe in Universe has more images of the show. Related: Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano in Lyon.
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Tokyo correspondent Vicente Gutierrez paid a visit to the Yokohama Museum of Art last month to check the exhibition Goth - Reality of the Departed World . Here's what he has to say about it:
Dr. Lakra, Untitled (Muscidae and Tea), 2007. Courtesy of the Artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City Unmistakably, Goth-culture has emerged from centuries ago back into the fore of 21st century life. While the noir-drenched subculture's origins are rooted in the aesthetics of the "gothic" art movement which permeated Europe from the 12th to 16th centuries, Goth imagery and iconography and fashion we see today is more connected to the 19th century British revival movement which entertained a longing for medieval times. The Goth culture of today, found in movies, music, fashion and literature, is influenced more by the revival movement and hinges on darker, yet familiar, concepts of death, darkness or night, abnormality, insanity and just about anything that is opposed to a healthy and conservatively-perceived status quo. And so, the youth, pop-culture as well as contemporary art have been infected with notions of Goth. Whether it be Marylyn Manson's baroque stadium tours, a noir-revival in film or artists who explore death, deformation of the body or self-identity, these attempts break through the norm of the status quo. The exhibit at the Yokohama Museum of Art featured approximately 250 works of contemporary sculpture, painting, video and photography by six internationally active artists to cite a new working definition of 'Goth' in a contemporary setting.
Shown in Japan for the first time, the detailed, wooden sculptures of Ricky Swallow [Australia] juxtapose vanity and death with the use of skull iconography in this work. Even though skull iconography seems to be everywhere as of late, Swallow also displayed a delicately wood carved skeleton with so much invested work that it seemed human. Each bone, while carved and pieced together delicately to replicate the raw, natural human form, echoed of [human] flaws. The composed, docile macabre posed in the center of the room, with an enigmatic chagrin. In addition to his woodcarvings, Swallow's sculpture of a bronzed vintage boom box further expressed the artist's concern with the flow of time, whether in cyclical or standstill. To preserve what we love despite beauty's transience, knowing it will ultimately die, reminds us of the brevity of life and the tragically comforting adage, that nothing lasts forever.
Spanning the wall of the exhibit space were Pyuupiru's collection of self-portraits which featured the artist with a variety of dramatic, mutilated poses. Appearing androgynous at times, self mutilation and modification were the tools the artist has taken to find her true self in hopes of actualizing her value as a person- psychologically and physically. With the progression of photographs, perhaps Pyuupiru is awaiting a final metamorphoses. How long? Remains a question for the viewer and artist alike. Here, the photos are said to present the process of transformation from man to woman and from a monster to a total self. The incision, modification and mutilation of her physical self seem not to deflect her bold and persistent gaze at the camera- what appears fragile on the surface is not. Rather, in exploring her self identity, her search for true-self is nihilist although a longing for a perfect love of self is detectable.
Comfortable in his technique, tattoo artist Dr. Lakra [Mexico] used vintage Mexican magazine covers (featuring pin up girls and wrestlers) as canvas for his permanent ink. While some of his exhibited works were completed during his residency at the Yokohama Museum of Art Common, Lakra's concerns with death led him to rely on dark iconography such as demons, bats, insects, spiders and gothic patterns which are intertwined with the beautification of the very figures he draws upon. The darker image of Lakra maintains as beautiful literally overwrites original perceptions of these vintage cover models; shunning the original conventions. Lakra's subversive obsession with kitsch beauty and death is perhaps strongly correlated to his up brining in Catholic-heavy Mexico, where such conservative ideas pervade. Continuing to mix the sacred and the secular, Lakra's resistance to an overarching conservatism is clear.
Masayuki Yoshinaga's [Japan] massive archive of street photos of modern day Goth youth, reveal the culture's current vitality. In this collection of photos, Goth iconography is seen translated in a variety of ways- the lolita dresses pervade, as does heavy, aesthetically-driven make up in addition to teeth actually sharpened into a set of fangs. Another stronger body modification, for the truly committed goth, were triangle slits into tongues for a vampire or serpent effect. Yoshinaga's lens focuses on the more colorful and vibrant tangent off the Goth tradition- youth who's obsessive concentration on their subculture suggests a darker, clouded periphery. That is, all else, i.e. values of the status quo, are meaningless. In order to capture such vanity, Yoshinaga elects subjects who wear their heart on their sleeve, no matter how dark it may be.
For this exhibition, a new video installation was created around the theme of human life, which the artists symbolized through birth, maturity and aging. One video, focused on multiple angles of an infant, simply laying on a cold, tiled floor unable to move or walk. In its peril, the infant managed roll over, all the while crying, for some kind of salavation. Is there something beautiful in this or do we file it under morbid? Concerned with conditions of human existence, IngridMwangiRobertHutter's videos provide introspection into moments we opt, and opt not, to remember or avoid confronting but nevertheless expected in our life span. Moreover, how do we deal with the violence, injustice and consequent endemic suffering in our world? Other projected clips focused on an older individual going through suffering, as if surviving a failed suicide attempt from a buildling as well as an elder patient anxiously awaiting in a clinical room.
In a darker room, Tabaimo's large format 360 degree video installation, raised to the ceiling, presented an inner imaginative world where severed hands and feet floated in an interstitial space within the circular canvas. The looped animated sequence revealed a fluid morphing and mutilation of body parts into and out of each other. More fascinating than disturbing, closer attention to the enigmatic evolution of the floating limbs, garnered Tabaimo's individual aesthetic as an animator. From this collection of contemporary works, Goth is clearly moving onto a wider platform. It is not only the style or the fashion, but rather a means to communicate profound ideas of life, whether those be painful or sorrowful or morbid, they are messages with the same importance and relevance of those found in pop art, or other avenues of pop culture. And on such a platform, these contemporary artists will continue their reflections on birth, death and the transformations that come in between.
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