A room of wonder | Tokyo Wonder Site

A room of wonder | Tokyo | The Project

                                                                                                                       photo by Yoi Kawakubo

A room of wonder | Tokyo

An idea that has been charming me for a while. Some time ago, thinking about ways of saving one's memory in this subtle struggle against disappearance, and at the same time involved in a private reflection on an artist's ability to leave traces that can be experienced by other people, I came across the cabinets of curiosities, also called wunderkammer. These wonder rooms were private collections during the Renaissance, individual portrayals of the vastness and sublime of the world in a room.   A devotional place, with no apparent rational categorization, but where the display was meant to produce wonder, to incite one's own imaginative recollection of the world.

A room of wonder | Tokyo takes inspiration in these wonder rooms and invites a group of artists to the adventure of creating a collection of wonders and its translation and insertion in real time in an exhibition room for common share, with no limit of the medias used. A collection of their artistic trajectories, of their daily lives, of their belonging to different histories of art, of the scene, of their imaginaries and of their time. A collection of Japanese men and women, dancers, actors, sculptors, video artists, performers, ordinary people, working collaboratively across fields, helping each other, sharing tools and knowledge for the creation of one room of wonders.

There in Tokyo, it was amazing, touching and very exciting to be together with a fantastic team of artists. Full of ideas and with a sincere will to share and merge into each other questions and biographies, this group has gradually built their own collection of wonders, their standpoints, gathering their letters to the future. A partial view of this world is here open to the public. Be our guest.

A project by: Gustavo Ciríaco (Rio/Lisbon)

In collaboration with:

Daiske Kino-Shita - musician

Kae Ishimoto - dancer

Kento Nito – sculptor and performing artist

Koh Sato – performance and visual artist

Yoi Kawakubo - photographer

Megumi Kamimura – dancer and choreographer

Noriyuki Kiguchi – theatre maker

Ryo Fujii – visual artist / sculptor

Takumi Kitada – visual artist / sculptor

       

Room 308: Daiske Kino-Shita, Kento Nito and Noriyuki Kiguchi

Room 508: Kae Ishimoto, Koh Sato and Yoi Kawakubo

Room 502: Megumi Kamimura, Ryo Fujji and Takumi Kitada

The photos in the posts below were taken under the OPEN STUDIO |  Tokyo Wonder Site – Ayoama, last November 23 (Fri.), 24(Sat.), 2012.

A room of wonder | Tokyo | The Collection

Room 308

(B)

Soft impact, by Kento Nito.

Kento Nito 

Sculptor and performing artist. Innovative in his different approaches to art, here he blends video and performance for one single moment of soft impact. When as a teenager, Kento had the experience of falling from high fence (6m). He would have died, if it weren’t for a pile of straw that   has smoothen the impact of his fall. Later on, he decided to be an artist. In his video, in a subjective camera, we accompany someone in his wanderings in an outside area between buildings. We see what he sees while he walks up the stairs: the sky, clouds, windows, some passing birds and then in the courtyard downstairs we see partially some straw on the floor. Out of a sudden, we realize this person is falling. The moment he reaches the straw on the floor, we feel a soft impact.

 (A)

Through my eyes, by Daiske Kinoshita.

Daiske Sound System box by Kento Nito.

Daiske Kinoshita is a flute and contemporary musician, used to play from classical composers to experimental contemporary music. As wonder, his very experience of playing and expressing through music at the same time as he sees the reactions of the people in the audience. Only he can see this. In a box, with a connecting tube hanging outside it, stands Daiske's particular sound system. The visitors can produce any sound and it becomes  music. This way, while trying different sounds, the visitors make a short concert with the box for the small audience of visitors that accompanies them. They reenact this way Daiske’s experience without realizing it. 

(C)

Noriyuki Kiguchi is a theatre maker who found his theatre during his experience as a worker at construction sites. His boyhood was marked by an ambiguous perspective towards future. On one side the future was dark, pessimistic, as portrayed in films as Mad Max and The day after. On the other hand, it would be when technology would save mankind. The future was the years 2000, our present time now. Central to this period of his life was the meeting with metal music, his first individual artistic choice. As a way of translating this experience expanded over his years of as a teenager, he thought of a book where the images of these two possible futures would merge to here and now. His project is yet to be concluded. The essence, though, of how it’s going to be like is already there.

A room of wonder | Tokyo | The Collection

Room 502

(1)

It’s your fault, by Ryo Fujii.

Ryo Fujii

A sculptor and multimedia artist, as a teenager, Ryo had the habit of inviting friends for meetings for which he didn’t show up. Instead he chose a particular context where his friends would interact, such as a canteen, the working place for the girl that one of his friends secretly admired. Hidden away, he would check their reactions. As a translation to this situation, he asked the visitor in front a closed door, to give the instructions for an excellent performer who is the room.  I want something very dramatic. I want to see the limits of human being. I want to laugh, were some of the things the visitors have asked. Door open and then closed. Lights on. The performer accomplishes the task. Now the next performer.

(2)

Are you satisfied?, by Takumi Kitada.

Takumi Kitada

A sculpture artist, dealing with photography, installation, interactive art and drawing. He is silent, attentive and serious, but sensitive to people’s demands. When he was at the age of five, his father was very sick and his death was eminent. In this fragile state, yet not feeble in spirit, taught his son how to carve until it the work was done. More than teaching a skill that would be fundamental in his practice, his father was leaving a legacy in values. Applied ethics. He would say: Are you satisfied? In a room with two chairs facing each other, Takumi with his calm mood asks the visitor the same question: Are you…?

 (3)

The space you draw in, by Megumi Kamimura

Megumi Kamimura

As a choreographer and dancer, Megumi is curious about how a body in space creates poetry out of position and dislocation. As a wonder, Megumi selected a quite ordinary experience, but one that has produced in her a sense of the sublime she was after. Everyday she would pass, in her daily metro ride, by a very open non-space, in the sequence of a typical Tokyoite urban landscape fragmented by layers and layers of man-made constructions. She remembers the sensation that produced in her. As an experience, the visitor followed instructions written in pieces of paper in certain points of the room. The fridge is listening to your breathing. The floor is seeing the back of your feet. Little by little, one is carried through the space until an open space is revealed. The vacant space is watching you.

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.