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Ryota Kuwakubo is one of wmmna's favourite artists. From loopScape, a shooting game that makes players run around the cylindrical LED screen to follow their spaceship to fluid that reformats live electronic jamming into a hand-held device, to PLX, a battle game where two people compete with each other but play totally different games, to his robots that mediate human interactions, etc. I expect devices, gadgets, bits and electronics from Kuwakubo so who would have guessed i'd love his latest cardboard-based exhibition at the Galerie Lucy Mackintosh so much?
The Japanese artist didn't work on his own but with Reico Yamaguchi as part of Perfektron (apparently he was a bit sick of navigating in a male-dominated techno-world.) The installation is called COCOSOCOASOCO. Coco is "here", Soco is "there" and Asoco is "further place." The giant tea cup, spoon, apple and mini buildings invite the visitor to play with their mental and spatial perception. The objects are painted in grayscale and have a distorted optical relationship between one another, created by different scales to emphasize the linear perspective. Walking through the white space of the gallery filled with these simple and odd 3D shapes was a bit surreal. There is no visible technological process in COCOSOCOASOCO, but the objects are drawn and designed on the computer, to be reproduced with precision on a planar surface and then built in 3-D. Ryota Kuwakubo and Reico Yamaguchi want to surpass the disillusionment gravitating in technology nowadays. The gallery is also selling little souvenirs such as the Bitman devices Kuwakubo made with the Maywa Denki. Apparently, they stopped producing them, i immediately got my hands on one. COCOSOCOASOCO runs until January 27 at the Galerie Lucy Mackintosh, Lausanne (Switzerland). My images on flickr. Goodies: Nicolas Nova typed down the notes he took during Kuwakubo's talk at the LDM/EPFL and Jonah Brucker-Cohen interviewed the artist on gizmodo a couple of weeks ago. |
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I paid a short visit to this fascinating museum, which opened its doors to the public last weekend - November 25, to be exact. Kyoto International Manga Museum is definately a very cool place for those who want to learn and explore the rich history of Manga.
The museum currently has 200,000 Manga books, 50,000 of which are easily accessible by the museum visitors. Indeed, they built a 140-meter wide Manga Wall on the second floor. Kyoto Seika University (see the related entry: Japanese Universities Hiring Manga Professors) and the city of Kyoto collaborated to turn a closed-down elementary school (Ryuchi Elementary School) into this museum. The museum's director is Takeshi Yourou (ICC profile page), a well-known professor/anatomist/author.
The museum seems quite successful so far. 1,400 people visited it on Saturday and additional 1,400 on Sunday. Locals are excited to see how their school was transformed. Long time ago, the students were not allowed to read Manga books at school (at least, they were frowned upon). Now, the place is full of Manga books! Visitors are from all age groups. According to what the museum staff observed, the museum is facilitating kids, young adults, parents, and grandparents to really communicate with each other. There are many international visitors as well. When the museum opened on November 25, 30 people were waiting in line, only 3 of which were Japanese.
I am so ignorant that I didn't know Manga existed in Meiji era, i.e., about 100 years ago. The first Japanese Manga-zine is believed to be Eshinbun Nipponchi (published in 1874). Some of the classic Manga styles look pretty cool and they could possibly be reused for designing varieties of modern visual artifacts. In fact the museum is trying to design a model that facilitates such reuse. Even though they've already collected a large number of Manga books, they don't believe that they can collect all Manga books in the world in this facility. There are already many smaller places that archive Manga books and the museum is more likely to become the key "portal" for facilitating access to all Manga books in Japan (and beyond), rather than the ginormous central library for everything. Manga, as media for expression and communication, is closely related to various kinds of academic disciplines. It can also provide rich data for historical and sociological analysis. It's good that the museum has a floor for people who want to do Manga-related research. But, again, the best thing about this museum is that it's fun. One of the visitors said she, as a huge fan of Manga, was going to stay in the museum for the whole day! Special thanks to Ichiro Abe of Kyoto Seika University / Kyoto International Manga Museum for sharing information and thoughts. Related entry: From Anime Center to Manga Museum |
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Last Thursday, i spent a couple of hours at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon. They have a superb exhibition of the works of three of the most famous artists from Kaikai Kii Co., the art nexus run by Takashi Murakami: Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano. According to Murakami the Japanese do not separate art and commerce like we do in the West. Art is closer to entertainment than to philosophy and ideology. Kaikai Kiki was therefore created on the lines of a management company that sells prints, stuffed toys, clothing and other art merchandise, while supporting the gallery and museum shows of its artists.
The first room of the exhibition presents Aya Takano's endearing world of noseless, big-eyed girls discovering (hetero/homo)sexuality. Her work finds inspiration in the ukiyo-e and shunga tradition. The manga-like paintings and watercolours elegantly reflect the current Japanese transliteration of the Lolita complex, called Lolicon. The way she uses diluted paint highlights the sensual simplicity and childish perversion of her portraits. I particularly liked the series of little drawings that come with a very short text relating a sexual experience. Their titles gives you an idea: The First Time I Had An Orgasm Was, A Night of Forbidden Desires, I Felt His Penis Press against My Groin, The First Time I Did It, etc.
The second room of the exhibition was occupied by Mr.'s works. Taking his name from the national baseball superstar Shigeo Nagashima’s alias “Mister� (which makes it tricky to find information about him on google), his drawings, paintings and giant dolls depict large-eyed cartoon characters in a context which is often sexual. Like Takano's his art pieces echoes the fascination with young children found frequently in the Japanese comic industry. His fame started with the tiny drawings of manga-inspired lolitas he was drawing on tickets, agenda pages, etc.
The young girls of his "kawai/cute" paintings and sculptures have pink hair, they wear very short skirts, briefs or nothing at all. They jump, danse, fly and tease carelessly. The most fascinating piece of the show for me wa a painting called Journey. The artist made the work a couple of years ago but he wasn't happy with it. To give it a new twist for the Lyon exhibition, he decided to burn it. The hardest part of the work/performance was to stop the fire when the piece was good enough. Finally came Chiho Aoshima’s computer-generated world of desire and terror where skulls, flowers, reptiles, and young girls inhabit a mechanized future. Recalling historical Japanese scroll painting, each image created by the artist (whose City Glow graced Gloucester Road tube station in London) is infused with stylistic references to manga.
The disasters and looming threats Aoshima presents in her works are gracefully choreographed. If you never thought that plague could be exquisite, have a look at Magma Spirit Explodes. Tsunami Is Dreadful, from the right to the left of the composititon tormented sea waves effortless give way to human despair and bright flames.
I put a few images on flickr. I wish i could have taken more but after having told me for the third time that pictures were not allowed inside the museum, the guards were getting quite irritated. There's a virtual visit of the expo online though. Merci neurone1234 for the links you sent me! Images of Aya Takano's works: 1, 2 and 3. Check also her flash animation: The world after 800,000,000 years. |
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A very very nice Japanese Pavilion. Instead of presenting us his vision of the future of architecture as other countries do, the curator of the pavilion, Terunobu Fujimori, highlighted two art movements that have been active for over a decade in Japan - the architecture of Terunobu Fujimori and ROJO (the Roadway Observation Society.)
Everyone had to remove their shoes to walk through a square hole in a wooden wall to enter the exhibition room paved in tatami mats.
Fujimori, sometimes called the world's only "surreal architect", uses traditional materials such as earth, stone, wood, charcoal, tree bark and mortar. Adding living plants in his buildings to express his interest in the relationship between architecture and nature (pots of chives sway in the breeze on the roof of the Chive House while the roof of Single Pine House has a pine tree growing on it.) Fujimori works with the Roadway Observation Society to search out interesting urban scenes around the world that no-one has paid attention to before. ROJO regards these scenes as expressions of the city's unconscious. The ROJO society was created in 1986 by Genpei Akasegawa (artist and novelist), Terunobu Fujimori (architectural historian), Shinbo Minami (illustrator), Joji Hayashi (writer) and Tetsuo Matsuda (editor).
The two images below illustrate Tokyo Plan 2101, a scenario imagined by Terunobu Fujimori. "During the 21st century, the sea level has continued to rise due to global warming. Venice, then Tokyo, have been covered with water. The trickiest problem is not to control the release of carbon dioxide but to reduce the large quantities already in the air. Terunobu came up with a plan in 2001. He presented it the Biennale of Architecture in Venice in 2006 but reports from the time indicate that his plan was "ridiculed as a fantasy."
Terunobu looked at the history of the planet rather than at the latest advances in science and technology, he then realized that a large amount of CO2 surrounded the Earth in its infancy. Later it was stabilized in two ways: it was made into coral by the action of coral polyps in the ocean and turned into wood by photosynthesis. His proposal called for new cities to be built in place of the old cities that are now under water using these two materials. High buildings were to be constructed of wood instead of steel and isolated with plaster on the outside. THe plaster was to be made of coral. Wood returns to CO2 when it roots or burns. When used as a construction material, the CO2 remains inside it." My images on flickr. Images from archiportale, forgemind and designboom. More on Fujimori's Works |
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The Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan recently selected "Japan's Media Art Top 100" based on the votes by the general public and experts. More than 33 thousand people voted this summer, and 25 works were selected in the following 4 areas: Art, Entertainment, Anime, and Manga. Here's the top 3 in each area: Art Entertainment Anime Manga An exhibition that showcases the selected top 100 works will take place at the National Art Center Tokyo, from January 21, 2007. Hope I can report more around that time.. |
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The new exhibition at Tokyo's NTT ICC is called Connecting Worlds, which just started this weekend and will last till November 26. It features a collection of works by artists such as ambientTV.NET, exonemo, Mass Dev., Muntadas, MOHRI Yuko + MIHARA Soichiro, Robert DAVIS + Usman HAQUE, Gavin BAILY + Tom CORBY, UBERMORGEN.COM feat. Alessandro LUDOVICO vs. Paolo CIRIO, Wayne CLEMENTS, Dennis OPPENHEIM, Manuel SAIZ, Peter FISCHLI & David WEISS, and TANO Taiga.
I visited ICC today, watched and played with most of the works exhibited there, and got really interested in ambient.lounge, Evolving Sonic Environment, and yes exonemo's OBJECT-B was outstanding. But, what is the common theme embodied in these different works? Connecting what? Any gaps you can imagine -- like gaps in space, time, people, cultures, social systems? Then I attended a 2+ hour talk event that discussed what "Connecting Worlds" mean and enable in art, science, sociology and other areas. It was hosted by Yukiko Shikata, ICC's well-known curator, and the discussants included Takashi Ikegami, a professor in complex science, Satou Toshiki, a sociology professor, and Mukul Patel and Manu Luksch of ambientTV.net. The discussions were quite interesting and thought-provoking. I wished more people attended the event. Mukul and Manu discussed privacy, surveillance, and identity in connected worlds by describing their works (e.g., see the entry "Dance performance for a live location-aware media environment") and their context. They mentioned DARPA's Total Information Awareness, cell phone eavesdropping by the US government, DARPA's Lifelog project, London's public campaign poster "Secure Watchiful Eyes" (see a related story on Wired "London's Privacy Falling Down.") I shouldn't forget to mention that their ongoing project "BROADBANDIT HIGHWAY" uses java scripts to hijack video streams from traffic surveillance webcams around the world, and montage these live sequences to make a real-time 24/7 road movie, re-broadcast on television.
Takashi talked about time -- unlike the traditional view that time is characterized by a linear sequence, his "texture model" is characterized by many loosely or strongly connected elements.He together with Keichiro Shibuya made Filmachine that is based on this model and influenced by John Cage's Time Bracket. He discussed openness, fluctuation and autonomy in relation to the texture model, not in detail but using interesting examples. Toshiki, from a sociologist point of view, eloquently discussed what sounded to my ears quite subtle. He sought examples that may show that "connecting" is a key element in Japanese aesthetics and arts. For example, the beauty of cherry blossoms is inseparably related to the image of a "storm" of falling flower petals that can give us the feeling of blurring boundaries between our bodies and the external world. He also mentioned a style of ancient poems -- each of those poems doesn't really make sense for itself but only makes sense if one knows other related poems. He also illustrated different approaches to sociological study. Traditional approaches are characterized by their orientation towards atomism, namely, identifying isolated components to explain social phenomenon and introduce the components' connections if necessary -- therefore, connections can be just add-ons and not integrated into the model's fundamental basis. The starting point of the other approaches is the world where everything is connected. Then a key issue is: how do we find and manage right boundaries. Boundaries are related to privacy. The challenge of wars is how to beat enemies, but a key challenge of coping with terrorism is to know who enemies are. Similar thing in coping with hard-to-cure contagious diseases. And the discussions continued, involving everyone on the stage -- It's nice to be able to attend a symposium like this -- made my visit to ICC much more interesting than I first expected. |
