The most striking thing about <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2009/E4FF">“Homeland 2020”, Misaki Kawai’s exhibit at Take Ninagawa</a>, is the size: it’s tiny. Just one room, the gallery is further miniaturized by Tokyo Tower, which looms over the neighbourhood like a disapproving elder statesman. Kawai responds to this environment with an explosion of kindergarten reminiscences: startling fabrics, papier mâché painted in unmixed tones, felt and string and plastic baubles and gems.
From these familiar materials, Kawai has built an amusement park that is itself miniaturized, though it is barely contained by the walls of the gallery. Floating in space on a shard of an Earth long destroyed, “Homeland 2020” is nostalgic without necessarily being celebratory. It is as if the thirty-something Kawai is looking at herself as a four year old girl looking twenty years into the future. It is wickedly kitsch. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Hindsight-2020-1.JPG" alt="Misaki Kawai, 'Homeland 2020' (2009)
Mixed media installation with three monitors and animated videos.
Dimensions variable. Installation at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo" title="Photo: Kei Okano" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" /> 
The very purpose of an amusement park is to distract and diverge, but “Homeland 2020” is suffused with environmental advocacy. We large creatures walk among its pieces carefully and protectively, squeeze against the wall to avoid damaging it in narrow places, float among satellites and debris in a Nintendo fantasy galaxy where everything is close.
“Homeland 2020” has three parts which fit together like an exploded pie chart, and are united by a ring-road train that navigates the circumference of the sculpture. Its cartoony, katamari characters perch on tree branches and ledges to watch giant screens embedded in the plaster hillsides, broadcasting animated advertisements for future products (Black Hole Time Travel Service) and touchstone brands (Panasonic; and for whom was the barrage of advertising not influential during childhood?). One particularly ebullient promo shouts, “Let’s go onsen! Let’s go moon!” Another more bitingly portrays a bear and a seal drowning after all the icecaps have melted. (I was reminded of the informational info-spots in Starship Troopers, but with construction paper.) 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/hindsight-2020-2.JPG" alt="Misaki Kawai, 'Homeland 2020' (2009)
Mixed media installation with three monitors and animated videos. Dimensions variable
Installation at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo" title="Photo: Kei Okano" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/hindsight-2020-3.JPG" alt="Misaki Kawai, 'Homeland 2020' (2009)
Mixed media installation with three monitors and animated videos. Dimensions variable
Installation at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo" title="Photo: Kei Okano" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
“Homeland 2020” must be taken seriously, if only because its conceit is that the Earth has been destroyed. With simple, juvenile instincts Kawai points to the fly-by-night instinct for survival that has let humanity stumble through a cold war but not necessarily environmental catastrophe. By idealizing the past, she acknowledges our infinite proficiency in idealizing a future free of consequence.

article_5494

Hindsight 2020

The very first thing I see when I enter TARO NASU, before the nod to the woman standing behind the desk, is a white wireframe hexahedron. It sits on a beam over the descending stairs beyond the heavy double doors, as if it began to grow there and the staff did not want to clear it away. I take the stairs down, and ten minutes pass before I realize the shape is part of the exhibit.
When TARO NASU moved into its Bakurocho basement in 2008, it was architect Jun Aoki who designed the brightly-lit white space. For “Midsummer Plants” Aoki has taken the helm again, turning off the lights and filling the gallery’s two rooms with plant-like sculptures that give off a soft glow.
In the first room stand six potted plants, their stems of copper tubing bursting from the flower bed in joyous swoops. They are topped by plump, spherical buds lit from the inside by diodes. They sway slightly in the still air. Afternoon light trickles in from the windows above the stairs. I think about what the exhibit would look like if TARO NASU were open past seven, with only the diffuse glow from within the works themselves. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/urban_jungle1.jpg" alt="Jun Aoki, 'Midsummer Plants' Installation view at TARO NASU" title="© Jun Aoki & Associates 2009. Courtesy of TARO NASU
Photo by Keizo Kioku" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" /> 
I imagine families and couples taking picnics here, pointing to fireflies dancing within the shady growth. An audio player tucked into a corner at the back of the gallery produces intermittent notes, as if water were falling from the roof of a cave and onto tinkling bells of glass.
A barrier has been constructed between the first and second rooms, columns of styrofoam one story high, sheared at the top like a picket fence. Crossing, I leave a cultivated grotto for more wild parts.
In the second room there are no windows, and the buds creep along the ground, spreading like pumpkins from long tendrils of electrical cabling. At the very back the plants have turned brown, cracked and dried. Here I see more of the wireframe shapes from the entrance. They dominate the ecosystem, as if the dying buds have shed their substance and their inward glow until only the most basic skeleton of their shape remains. The still room fills with the music of dripping. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/urban_jungle2.jpg" alt="Jun Aoki, 'Midsummer Plants' Installation view at TARO NASU" title="© Jun Aoki & Associates 2009. Courtesy of TARO NASU
Photo by Keizo Kioku" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" /> 
This short trip, from potted plants to untended cave, is repeated in reverse on the way out. Seclusion gives way to cultivation and at last, up the steps and out into the Tokyo sunlight I am back in the bustling cityscape, where geometry and biology battle in a different way.
Aoki’s plants exist as an uneasy truce between the insistent spread of nature into the most hostile environments, and the man-made materials that dominate Tokyo’s landscape. The plants, in gold, silver, deep blue, white and turquoise, made from wires and plastics and copper and fabrics, celebrate their own existence, shout, “look, we can grow here too.”
TABlog featured a <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2008/02/roppongi-gallery-building-closes.html">photo report</a> on the closing night in 2008 of the old Roppongi galleries’ building that previously housed TARO NASU.

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The Urban Jungle

My plans to crawl through Jun Aoki’s swampy installation at Taro Nasu were scuttled by two weeks of closed doors, and so I ducked in to nearby Gallery αM (pronounced “alpha em”), the basement exhibition space in Bakurocho run by Musashino Art University, to explore the mixed-media sculptures inhabiting the small space until September 5th.
“Metamorphosis – Objects Today” celebrates Musashino Art University’s 80th anniversary by displaying work that explores the changes material objects go through on their way to becoming sculpture. Volume 3, entitled “Formation of ‘something like it’,” showcases work by sculptors Takahiro Kamimura and Takaaki Izumi.
There’s not a lot of newness or complexity here, but there is plenty of color, exuberance and pop. The pieces, which include a battered television antenna hung upside down and strewn gleefully with ribbons, crushed balloons hanging from a nail, and a gleaming surf board on a stand, are presented cleanly and sparely in the white, basement space. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/sculptures-fun1.jpg" alt="Installation view, gallery αＭ (2009)
METAMORPHOSIS - Objects Today Vol.3 - Formation of 'something like it' - Takaaki Izumi x Takahiro Kamimura" title="Courtesy of gallery αＭ" width="518" height="347" class="imgcaption" /> 
One standout piece immediately beyond the entrance is a fluorescent structure of plastic, orange chicken wire spelling the word “WALL” in block capitals. It is a captivating study in clash, that defines the thing it is pushed up against, rather than the sculpture itself.
Also excellent, a cube of pastel petroleum cans, placed within a compartmentalized, clear plastic cube. Each can in ivory, blush pink and mint green assembles a unique identity for itself from its angles, and from its position in the multi-layered cube. The piece, which is as large as a kitchen table, has a raw energy to it, as if the sculptures have been purposefully frozen in the midst of rapid prototyping.
This is highly palatable contemporary art. Conceptually, Kamimura and Izumi come in at the ground floor, at least in this exhibit, but the core elements that define the foundations of Japanese pop art are all present: bright colors, machine parts and recycled materials, design elements and a gleeful desire to experiment with the line between precision and play. It is sculpture distilled, concentrated and utterly pleasant to stroll through. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/sculptures-fun2.jpg" alt="Installation view, gallery αＭ (2009)
METAMORPHOSIS - Objects Today Vol.3 - Formation of 'something like it' - Takaaki Izumi x Takahiro Kamimura" title="Courtesy of gallery αＭ" width="518" height="344" class="imgcaption" /> 
“Metamorphosis Vol. 4” begins September 12th, and features work by Yuuichi Higashionna.

article_5163

Formations of Fun

Why is it that industrial objects can remind us so much of living creatures, asks Shunji Yamanaka, designer, professor and exhibition director for “bones”, running till the end of August at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT.
“bones” seeks to unite the industrial and the organic by swapping the ways in which we might approach these objects: organic remains become design objects, and design objects are re-interpreted as organic, evolved structures, sometimes creatures.
On theme almost to a fault, “bones” begins with a descent down stairs of sterile concrete. We are accompanied by Eiji Yuzawa’s photographs of animal bones, an imitation of a museum catalogue but transformed by Yuzawa’s deep shading. His photographs expose the irregularities and oddities of evolution, especially the facial structure of a small mole, which looks more alien than earthly.
Beyond the first works and into a small room, Nick Veasey’s exceptional X-ray photography of everyday objects is on display. Here, a typewriter is given teeth, a hairdryer disguises itself as the gun found by airport security. Veasey, who hails from Britain, says that, unlike medical X-rays, “with industrial products it is the flow of energy and information and the communication of motive power that is exposed.” 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bones4.jpg" alt="Eiji Yuzawa's animal bone photography" title="Courtesy of 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT." width="518" height="385" class="imgcaption" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bones1.jpg" alt="Maywa Denki, 'Wahha Go Go'" title="Photo: Masaya Yoshimura" width="257" height="343" class="imgcaption floatr" />A freelance designer with connections to the game industry by trade, Kotaro Maeda’s inside-out spiders are placed in a chip-covered outdoor exhibit area in the centre of the building. Maeda calls his creatures “bone structure that cannot exist,” poking fun at the peculiarities of the natural world, and, subtly, the exhibit as a whole.
In the same room, ‘Wahha Go Go’ sits madly grinning. A creation of prolific and peculiar art unit Maywa Denki, the toothy robot’s explicit function is to imitate human laughter, at which it fails exquisitely. With its whining breath it strips away the mental complexity it hopes to imitate. Here we see not a machine stripped down to its bare essentials, but a human function reproduced with minimal parts. It is a gross experiment, to treat laughter as a “vibrational phenomenon,” but an engrossing one.
Also worth noting is Brazilian visual artist Ernesto Neto’s ‘Mientias Estamos Aqui’, a lugubrious building inside a building that seems to hang in the space it fills, rather than enclose it. I’ve seen more ambitious works by Neto at other galleries, but his tent-like structure is strikingly appropriate here, appearing to grow inside the room.
The last major work in the exhibit is a collaboration between Automata Master Shobei Tamaya and director Yamanaka, entitled ‘Skeleton automata YUMIHIKI on a boat’. The elegant, wooden automata performs the incredible function of plucking an arrow, loading it to a bow, and hitting a target a few feet away. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bones3.jpg" alt="Kotaro Maeda, 'Endoskelton spider'" title="Photo: Masaya Yoshimura" width="518" height="346" class="imgcaption" /> 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bones2.jpg" alt="Nick Veasey, 'Excerpts from Photography. Collection X-RAY'" title="Courtesy of 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT." width="257" height="315" class="imgcaption floatr" />“bones” mines the marrow of its motif in two ways: one, industrial design objects with their inner workings exposed, as a corpse might be resected; two, organic objects who have had their inner workings re-imagined as design objects. In the first sense, a living body is shown to reside within mechanical parts, as in Veasey’s photography or Maywa Denki’s wheezy robot ‘Wahha Go Go’. In the second, biological systems are transformed into something else, something that should not be, like in Yuzawa’s photography, or Maeda’s ‘Endoskeleton spider’.
As an exhibit, “bones” asks: by burying dynamic gears and cables under a smooth exterior, do we make our mechanical toys more human, or less? Is it, as Maywa Denki attempts, that by distilling function and form down to a single purpose we can imitate the complexities of living? Or, as Nick Veasey asks, by exposing the insides of the machine do we make it something more alien? What is it, for instance, about Veasey’s photograph of a Boeing 777 that causes, contrary to Veasey’s stated purpose, my architect friend to point out, almost instantaneously, the face apparent in the layout of the cockpit?
Yamanaka weighs in at the start of the exhibit: “Extracting the bones or the underlying structure of animals seems to accentuate the esprit of living organisms.” Contrariwise, “when we gather together the structures of industrial products, we…see the sequences of parts drawn up together to move in unison towards a common goal, and the traces of evolution occurring over years of innovation upon innovation.”

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Hindsight 2020

The Urban Jungle

Formations of Fun

Inside Out