A room of wonder | Tokyo | The Collection

Room 308

(1)

I am here to be with you, by Kae Ishimoto.

Kae Ishimoto

A dancer between Butoh and contemporary dance. A tiny figure with strong endurance powers. A piece set in a slightly dark room with just one chair and one bed. When you enter, there’s someone on the bed. You sit down and hold hands with him/her. After 5 min, she goes away. It's you turn to lie down on the bed. Another visitor comes in and sits on the chair. A time framed experience of 5 min for each situation. A simple experience between caring and being cared, about being in presence for someone. As experience, Kae chose this delicate moment while holding her hands with her grandmother, she passed away.

(2)

A person sitting in foggy darkness, by Yoi Kawakubo.

Yoi Kawakubo

A landscape photographer with minimalist inclinations, attracted to the ways photography writes through darkness and light, he chose as his first wonder the contact with the work of the Spanish realist painter António Lopez. Lopez's huge panoramic canvases would take years to accomplish due to his care with portraying the exact natural light. That provoked in Yoi a turning point in his way of making photos. It made him change the direction of his attention from the reflected light on a surface to the producer of the light and its surrounding areas. Yet, it was another experience, by the end of a foggy day in the mystic zone of Stonehenge, that he finally chose to portray. Blurred fields of light. His wonder, a dark room with sporadic strobo lights, fog and a chair, is better described below, in Yoi’s own words:

The bright side of the dark”, 2012

Three years ago, I went to shoot the ruins of Dartmoor National Park in England. Covered in fog all year round, Dartmoor National Park is a national park bigger than Metropolitan Tokyo.

To photograph some dolmens and stone circles, I left the car, and I went into the fog relying on a map and compass. During the shooting, I lost the way back to my car and started to wander the wetlands, while the night began to fall.

I put a flashlight trying to avoid the looming darkness, but a cold fear was amplified further in the night fog.

As the darkness become deep and I couldn't find the way back, some anxiousness began to sting my mind and I slowly started to panic, and then, suddenly a wild sheep suddenly appeared in front of me. Because of the fog and the dark I wasn't able to realize of its presence until it was surprisingly near. I was frozen and my tension reached its peak.

That moment, I remembered some old words, and I turned off the flashlight. By devoting oneself to the darkness, one became part of the night, and then the darkness becomes the light. I stood in silence staring at the darkness. As my eyes started to adapt to the darkness I noticed that around me it looked like a seabed of ultramarine blue with pale hazy fog surrounding. When I realized the sheep was gone.

As I listened, the wind flowing in the distance could be heard.

My fear was gone, and slowly a slightly shivering silence started to calmly flood my brain.

It was a very beautiful moment.

 Yoi Kawakubo 

(3)

(NOT) dissolving mood       ...................................   

Koh Sato

A video maker, drawer, visual and performance artist. As chosen moment, a personal family tragedy. A loss that has endured and become the source, the unsolved situation and the core of his recent art practice. The Tsunami that took away his mother’s life, but which left, standing amidst total destruction, a tall tree. Devastation and hope. This cheerful young man, totally engaged to the project decided to chat, have the participants draw their beloved ones and dissolve in water the copies of their figures. A conversational piece, between eminent loss and love for what the present still offers as shared presence.