Images printed (news) papers and their depiction. There is more than one surface in this series. How should we define the content of an image in this case? Between surfaces of different layers, the answer is hidden.
Life is revived where there is no signal.
Commodities and images which surround us in everyday life, they can be converted into a creative situation with slightest artistic manipulation. It does not mean that art work itself shoud be creative. Installing a situation which could return a moment where we are stimulated to think creatively is for me rather important.
As long as I do it as an artist, manipulation occurs inevitably and will never be zero. Mathematically thinking, there is infinite possibility before it reaches zero. There I find my place to work and it is for me as exciting as othere realm of art because of its potential and sustainability.
Living as a non-european in a so called civilized society, everyday I face a kind of ritual to play a role to be an another person in some way, although I do it naturally and have never recognized it as a ritual.
For example, I wear clothes which had been historically not my custom but something adopted to our daily life through the process of modernization.
In the case of japanese society, my ancestor were too impatient when they saw power of the occident for the first time after hundreds years of international seclusion.
Those in power wanted to gain western power to emulate them and one of the first thing they did was trying to dress like them.
The ritual happened, is happening and will be happening again and again as long as there is economical and political hierarchy among cultures.
This work is made for a group show “Les Maîtres Fous (Bad masters)” titled after a film which is made by a french film maker and anthropologist Jean Rouch.
Artists developed the exhibition under a theme of ritual. It was exhibited at Freies Museum Berlin untill 5. March.
“Guerrillero Heroico” is a portrait of Che Guevara which was taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba. This photograph is one of the most famous photographic portrait of our time and has been reproduced more than any other image in history of photography.
I was interested in how a photograph functions as an icon which is totally divorced from the essence of its subject. You recognize this image quite easily as a well known iconic photograph almost like a pictograph even if it’s composed of scant post notes. We however can never see it as a representation of a person unlike the original photograph should have been before it become an icon.
These images are a sequence of photographs which were taken every 3 minutes during evaporation of drops of water which were spread inside of a slide frame and projected by a slide projector.
Reality is seamless sequence of chance happenings which we experience in every moment, yet can never be “represented” by neither means of production nor reproduction. Banal natural phenomenon such as evaporation can be “fixiated” as images through visual documentation.
Fixiation of a moment is the essential nature of photography both technically and functionally. Photography has the ability to freeze a moment and to make it a fact and repetitional.
“Superficial landscapes” is a project, in which I attempt to bring superficiality as well as instability of the medium Photography to light. In the sense that images always must be carried by surfaces, namely Films and Papers, and can appear only as form of representation, photographic images are necessarily superficial.
The images I exhibit here, have been taken with cameras from which I stripped down the lenses. Thorough photographing with those cameras as if they were faultress, the images arise only as result of the action of photographing, not as absolute end product. Surfaces of the images become tangible, while perspective and form of the objects dissolve.
Exhibited in caritas gallery from 26. January to 27. March 2009 in Berlin.
This project is black-white version of “Superficial landscapes” which I made previously.
All images have been taken with a camera from which I stripped down the lenses. Thorough photographing with this camera as if it is faultress, those images arise only as result of the action of photographing, not as absolute end product. Surfaces of the images become tangible, while perspective and color of the objects dissolve.
Projection with 80 moisturized slide frames / 2008
We hardly have an occasion to contemplate something. In over flooded visual informations which are both recordable and editable, even the concept of time became quite vague.
In this work, I project drops of water which is spread on frames through a slide projector and let them just evaporate. If we call the images which are taken with camera “representation” of reality, I would say that the image projected here is a seamless “presentation” of what actually is happening inside of the projector.
The water completely evaporates in average of 3 hours, no one however would see the whole passage. When we encounter an occasion to contemplate continuous natural phenomenon such as evaporation, we could only feel the expanse of this phenomenon in our imagination.
Video projector as a subject of photography.
I was trying to shoot a moment where light not yet become an image.
In between space of lense of the projector and the wall on which image is projected, we can see those image as light and vice versa.
In japanese, the word “phorogrphy” literally means “recoding truth”, while it just describes only fundamental elements of the technic in european languages which originally means “drawing with light”. So my idea about this series was to show the contrast between those two totally different concepts of photography.
A photographic study about abstraction and concretion, object and subject. How a thing can be depicted and how far they can differ from what we see with our own eyes.
A difinition : Noises = The others
Noises are everything except for one’s own consciousness. We perceive time and reality through continuing the unconscious repetition of the action that we encounter a phenomenon that is noise as “the others” and experience it, accept it as the recognition of ourselves, then provide it for next encounter.
This is a representation of the mechanism how we accept what we perceive now as reality. And this space function as a virtual circuit of our thought.
Electronic medium which can signal-ize the information precisely which we perceive sensuously could be validest tool, when we aim to consider our own mechanism of thought, and represent it. Because, we should certainly signal-ize those informations we got whatever it is, since we exist as substance, but that’s impossible to look at those signals from out of our physical. The only thing we can possibly do at the moment is simulation with using those medium like Video.
