“A Blow to the Everyday”
OSAGE GALLERY
5/F, Kian Dai Industrial Building,, 73-75 Hung To Road
October 10–November 29
Yukihiro Taguchi, Away, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.
For “A Blow to the Everyday,” curator Yuko Hasegawa presents several works that transmute ordinary aspects of urban life. Japanese artists Kenichi Hagihara, Meiro Koizumi, Ayako Okubo, Yukihiro Taguchi, and Shiro Takatani and collectives Chim↑Pom and Wah engage with the seemingly mundane via performance, photography, video, installation, and painting.
In the performative installation Away, 2009, the Berlin-based Taguchi documents his visit to Hong Kong. A bamboo scaffold provides the physical framework for the installation, mimicking the look of buildings under construction. A series of found objects, including a traffic cone, an official city garbage can, and a toilet bowl, are placed in the bamboo structure alongside four videos. One features the artist running through the streets in the Kwun Tong industrial area performing parkour-like moves. The others utilize stop-motion photography to animate objects, such as the bamboo used in the installation. In these interactions between artist and city, the presentation of simple items like woven baskets evokes feelings of wonderment.
Koizumi narrates the terror of life in several videos, including Human Opera XXX, 2007, and Fhe Wav a Very Veautiful Woman . . ., 2001. These videos produce the curious effect of making tragic moments seem uncomfortably comic, provoking inappropriate laughs. Hagihara’s Sight Seeing Spot, 2009, comprises videos captured from a photo booth he placed in Hong Kong for one day and documents the processes wherein people approach self-portraiture and, resultantly, the construction of self-image. Though the various works differ in tone and approach, they cohere in the exhibition and create new vistas from which to view the diverse experiences and encounters of modern life.
— Doretta Lau
MAP Office
GOETHE-INSTITUT HONG KONG
14/F Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2, Harbour Road, Wanchai,
November 6–December 7
View of “MAP Office,” 2009.
“No man is an island,” wrote John Donne in 1624. Nearly four hundred years later, the cultural mythos of islands remains a powerful lure, provoking ongoing separatist propositions for individual subjects and collectives. Wrapped in contradiction and paradox, these dreams of escape and yearnings for a different life, channeled through an essay by Gilles Deleuze, form the foundation of the project “Desert Islands” (all works 2009) by the Hong Kong–based collective MAP Office (Valerie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez).
Featuring three videos, a central seating/viewing platform titled Domesticated Island, and a grid of one hundred mirrored acrylic panels, each with the outline of a specific island or chain of islands including Okinawa, Grenada, and the Florida Keys, laser-etched across the surface, the installation is deceptively light as it touches on such topics as global warming, forced migration, nuclear testing, ecotourism, Somali piracy, tax shelters, gun running, drug dealing, colonialism, tsunami devastation, and the complicated history of utopia. Indeed, the idea of utopia and its association with islands, from Thomas More to Dubai’s man-made the World, becomes the inescapable vortex at the center of the project. As evidenced in the numerous film clips that make up the three-channel video Island Resort, the social situations that develop on islands are effective control groups, offering rare insights into the conflicted engagement of the individual with society. And all too often, the drama of utopian aspirations concludes with the return of civilization, its barbarism intact: Robinson Crusoe’s capitalist imperative and Piggy’s brutal murder are just two examples. Ironically, and despite the antics of Johnny Depp, it was the pirates who created the most successful utopias: communities free of government, economic hierarchies, and mandatory labor in Madagascar, the Bahamas, and the coast of Morocco in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where a model of individual freedom was established that is celebrated to this day.
Thus, ultimately, the island is a utopian concept of subjectivity and its geographic location. This connection is effectively underscored in MAP’s use of mirrors. Reflecting the images of spectators in the gallery back at them, the Lacanian mirror stage, that moment of narcissistic ego formation that allows individuals to distinguish themselves from “the Other,” is slyly evoked. Standing in the midst of the crowded opening and suddenly noticing one’s distorted doppelgänger across the room, one couldn’t help but think Donne’s famous assertion a dirty lie.
— Charles LaBelle
Seiji Aruga
ROENTGENWERKE AG
2-5-17, Nihonbashi Bakurocho, Chuo-ku,
October 2–October 31
Seiji Aruga, le, 2009, paper, 16 x 16 x 2".
Paper, Seiji Aruga’s medium of choice, is ideally suited to his spatial and tactile art. In Aruga’s latest works, his earlier, intricate constructions give way to equally intricate subtractions. From afar, le, 2009, conjures up a partially teleported version of Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground, 1914–15. The square appears to be carved into the middle of the vertically arranged composition, but a closer look reveals a side view of laterally stacked paper. The perimeter edges and the surface of this recessed inner square are uneven, adding to the concrete and physical texture of the piece.
Aruga is ever mindful of directionality in his works: Just a few years ago, his monochrome constructions had a distinctly architectural feel to them, but his most recent output eschews any resemblance to postmodern cityscapes. Aruga’s 2008 work 1018 brings to mind a composite city skyline complete with tiered skyscrapers; its simultaneously geometric and organically cavernous sequel 1020, 2009, reverses the anticipated upright direction, removing all traces of figuration.
In addition to the punched and layered paper pieces on view, the show also includes several subtle pencil drawings. These take the artist’s spatial arrangements a step further, recalling a single detail from the three-dimensional works. Aruga presents his colorless and minimal world as a paradox. The shadows in the drawings, where modeling is necessarily fixed, project a sense of shifting instability bolstered with every new glance, while the shadows of his three-dimensional works appear set and solid.
— Julia Friedman
“Light Streams”
CENTER FOR COSMIC WONDER
5-18-10 Minamiaoyama, Minato-ku,,
September 4–November 7
View of “Light Streams,” 2009.
Since its debut in 2000, Cosmic Wonder has carved out a special place in the expansive gray area between art and fashion. Founded by architect-turned-artist Yukinori Maeda (who maintains a separate art practice under his own name), the project has two dedicated spaces in Tokyo and Osaka that serve as hybrid gallery-boutiques. Both present seasonal “collections” that are amalgams of clothing, art installations, and publications.
The entry corridor at “Light Streams,” the current exhibition in the Tokyo center, features a video shot in a Parisian gallery, in which beautiful models dressed in Cosmic Wonder wares “perform” as art viewers with subtly eccentric choreography. In the minimal main space, a few pieces of clothing are displayed on sculptural racks. (The rest are hidden behind the white wall panels or inside a mirrored cube.) The same garments, such as a gold lamé circle dress and a retro prairie shirt, also appear in the photographs that line the walls, captured in the slightly dated antifashion pictorial style popularized by Purple magazine. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the photographers are Purple alumni.)
While Henry Roy captures a gold-circle-clad man and woman trekking through a sun-dappled field, Takashi Homma disconnects the clothing from human usage and lays it out in a snowy forest like otherworldly debris. Laetitia Benat’s pictures aspire to portraiture of the apparel (not the girl in it), and Mark Borthwick applies his trademark sun flare to some half nudes in a garden. These works are most interesting when viewed as an extension of the Cosmic Wonder project, which itself is intriguing mostly for its unique definition of branding and endlessly reflexive dialogue between art and commerce. The photos, zines, and installations serve to sell the clothes, while the clothes further propagate the aesthetic of the photos, zines, and installations. Through it all, Cosmic Wonder’s guileless position seems quite simple––chasing the joys of lying down in a sun-dappled forest clearing in a gold lamé dress.
— Samantha Culp
Meiro Koizumi
MORI ART MUSEUM
Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-Ku
July 25–November 8
Meiro Koizumi, Human Opera XXX, 2007, color video, 17 minutes. Installation view.
Occupying two tiny areas in the bowels of the Mori’s vast Ai Weiwei survey, Meiro Koizumi’s project is modest but not insubstantial. The two video installations by Koizumi pack considerable emotional punch, predicated as they are on unraveling the dynamics of melodrama and then stitching them back together for full tragicomic effect. The sophistication of Koizumi’s work lies in its refusal to fall into smug self-satisfaction at exposing the superficiality of culturally constructed sentiment, opting instead to tease out clichés and see what gives them such purchase on human relationships.
Human Opera XXX, 2007, details Koizumi’s increasingly bizarre and irrelevant directorial interventions into the confessions of a man invited to tell a sad story on camera. That the protagonist manages to complete his tale of alcoholism and family breakdown with a hunk of bread in his mouth and a ridiculous cartoon on his face addresses both the power of recent visual culture’s confessional aesthetic and a genuine need to offload personal tragedy.
My voice would reach you, 2009, is more explicitly cinematic in its construction, featuring a man, standing in the street, engaged in what appears to be a long-overdue cell-phone conversation with his mother. The scene plays once as viewed from an outsider’s perspective, with the sound of the man’s words accompanied by a “touching” score, and again with the addition of the voices of confused call-center operators on the other end of the line responding to the script. Installed alongside real childhood photos of the actor with his mother and a letter written to her after her death, the work plays for laughs but retains remarkable emotional piquancy.
— Reuben Keehan
Shinro Ohtake
TAKE NINAGAWA
2-12-4 HigashiAzabu, Minatoku,
October 17–November 28
Shinro Ohtake, Memory of Color 1/Born to Please, 2008, oil, lacquer, printed matter, photographs, rice paper, wallpaper, cotton yarn, plant matter, varnish, wood and acrylic board in custom frame, 17 x 14".
“Shell & Occupy 4” features the latest examples of Shinro Ohtake’s “stickering” method—the white noise of found objects strewn together, then contained by oil paint. The resulting effect is simultaneously gritty and sleek. The exhibition’s highlight is the wall-size multimedia assemblage Latitude of the Memory of Color/Galaxy, 2009, whose title indexes Ohtake’s two key preoccupations: color and memory.
The “Beach” cycle, created this past year, just as Ohtake was designing a public bath in Naoshima, emphasizes the memory component of his work. Here, vintage reproductions of swimsuit models are worked over with various materials. Partially obscured with the buildup of sand, plant seeds, and impasto painting, the pieces evince a wistful quality echoing the fragility of old images. In the 2008 collage series “Memory of Color,” in which Ohtake has combined lacquer, printed and plant matter, wallpaper, cotton yarn, and old photographs—topping this heavily varnished accumulation of found objects with multicolored splotches of oil paint—color is literally the starting point. The “Memory” images brilliantly articulate their spatial aspect by making the found objects appear from behind the painted-over Plexiglas base—the empirical contained by the subjective.
Ohtake has been an integral part of the Japanese art scene for some thirty years now, his densely layered images bringing into focus the impact of popular culture on contemporary art, as well as the lasting debate over the true relationship between Western and Japanese artists. Tellingly, the artist once cited among his major influences a schizophrenic outsider, Adolf Wölfli, whose metanarratives blended his personal mythology with actual and fictitious events of world history. When Ohtake arranges the layers of found objects with his drawings and paintings before varnishing and encapsulating them into custom frames that seal and bond the contents of the work, he performs a similar act of personal and cultural amalgamation, archiving his unique perception of the discarded cultural ephemera on display.
— Julia Friedman
Ohm Phanphiroj
H GALLERY
201 Sathorn Soi 12
November 4–December 2
Ohm Phanphiroj, Untitled, 2009, black-and-white photograph, 10 x 14 1/2". From the series “The Disabled,” 2009.
Ohm Phanphiroj’s latest series of photographs, “The Disabled,” 2009, was shot at the “Male Disabled Center and Rehabilitation” in southeast Thailand. In these works, Phanphiroj eschews the high production values of his previous images of beautiful young men and Thai transsexuals for heavily shadowed and mostly gritty black-and-white shots. Many of the figures lie or crouch; some are naked, including one man who is tied to a pipe while, nearby, a dog dozes in the shade. Phanphiroj also resists the conventions of portraiture for views of the disabled men in situ. Soulless concrete architecture is featured consistently.
A number of photographs show his subjects struggling with the ritual of washing themselves. In one work, a youth staring impassively from the edge of bed is juxtaposed with the useless legs of a fellow patient. An exception in the series is a touching color photograph of a man smiling, albeit inanely, at the viewer.
“The Disabled” demonstrates Phanphiroj’s strengths as a photographer insofar as he manages to invoke a certain tradition––documentary photographs of “the other”––while complicating the tradition’s raison d’être. That is, these photographs resist voyeurism and spectacle. This is a welcome departure in terms of Phanphiroj’s oeuvre generally (his previous series rely heavily on conventional precedents) and suggests a necessary signpost for those who choose to work in this mode.
— Brian Curtin
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