Scion Installation Gallery Presents "Pacific"

Scion presents

PACIFIC

Curated by PMKFA & Antonin Gaultier

Pacific - Catalogue.indd 1 4/30/11 7:33 PM

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The Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on the planet, with count-less islands scattered over it. Due to their disconnected geographical

position, these self-contained island units have remained culturally distinct from one another. Without close neighbours, a self-reliance has emerged;

the resilience of the human mind driving an independence of thought. Even after generations of global interconnections the integrity of these

units is relatively intact.

These island societies might be prime examples of monoculture, but essentially is the exceptional individuals who truly fuel their progres-

sion. Those individuals who invert the common cultural logic, who invert perception. They ignore intended function and create their own worlds

from impulses as natural to them as the instincts that make them turn their heads to look at forgotten and discarded pieces of their worlds.

What others see as material commodities are the building blocks of Pacific. By questioning what really constitutes “the everyday”, these individuals

can approach unseen perspectives, and even enlightenment. These perspectives are as disrupting to the norms of conformed societies as surfacing landmasses are to masses of water. In the Pacific the mundane can transform into the poetic, the unwanted can morph into the amusing

and the practical can become something beautiful.

Curated by

PMKFA & Antonin Gaultier

Featuring

Atsuhiro Ito, Kyohei Sakaguchi, Megumi Matsubara, Motoyuki Daifu, PMKFA, Takashi Suzuki, Teppei Kaneuji, Ujino, Yotaro Niwa, Yuri Suzuki

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CURATOR’S WORD


and while he does not himself appear in any of this series photos, his presence could not be more overstated.

Daifu charts a liminal space that inhabits and simultaneously transcends the public and the private. However mundane the subject matter of family portraiture may appear, Daifu’s subjects are the converse. Daifu of-fers domestic imagery that both commands our gaze and spirals it inward, scanning for family dynamics which could have only, soley constructed such a scene. In the end, the Daifus become characters for viewers as Daifu conveys, “family is everyday life, if not a big part of your life.” These photographs are a reminder of how we act on the inside. At home, everyone acts differently than in the public sphere- no matter the age or generation; and when we are away from family, or from a parent’s watchful eye, we feel the first steps of what we will come to know as independence.

“The everyday” can be split into any number of dichotomies, consider the Public and the Private. In tandem, each defines the each other as we constantly discern which information, whether truths or behaviors alike, is best kept private or displayed. There is little way to tell where Daifu Motoyuki positions himself between these two worlds. Is the artist an extrovert claiming to have no secrets or do the photos elude to a nulled voyeur of private life?

To entertain an affront whimsical side of the artist, a post on his website reads, The Fam-ily is a Pubis That I Cover With Pretty Panties, which is to invite the viewer to examine the photographs for, as he suggests, two things. In this series of photographs, the line the photographer has drawn for himself appears to be in constant erosion by the unrelent-ing portrayal of everyday life, it is nearly non-existent. Acknowledging the family as private has appeared to fuel Daifu’s shutter

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MOTOYUKI DAIFU

Written by Vicente Gutierrez


and into the world. For the average Japanese, continuing to live at home is rooted in a value of filial piety. Some West-erners may scratch their heads at how long the average Japanese child continues to live at home, traditionally extending up to one’s forties. Yet, if taking pictures of the family is to teach us anything, it is to teach us life’s hard-learned lessons about concepts of freedom, agency and adulthood while instill-ing the joy and pain of what it is to be born into a social dynamic. Dynamics which range from the intensely personal to a universal sense of understanding. For Daifu, that’s how we learn strength. “My family is tough and during the big earthquake last month, they didn’t budge. And that’s how I learned what freedom was.”

Motoyuki Daifu lives and works in Tokyo.www.motoyukidaifu.com

For Daifu, there is a joy in rendering daily life as subject matter, in particular, his mother’s recent discovery of Tetris. “As soon as she gets home from work she’ll start playing Tetris on Game Boy, often skip making dinner and just play straight through the recent earthquake aftershocks. It’s been like this for days.” But why does Daifu snap the everyday life of his family? Simply put, he responds: “Because I love my family.” It is the sad truth for most, as we get older, we grow away from our families and these fleet-ing moments of natural intimacy only seem to happen less and less. “You can always remember a good day with your family. There will always be good photographs, so I enjoy the time I spend with my family. I don’t need to try to convey anything.” It happens naturally for Daifu.

In the West, we’d like to think egoist rebel-lion propels (or expels) us from the long-cast shadow of our parents. Out of the house

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Above & next spread.Motoyuki Daifu.The Family is a Pubis, So I Cover It With Pretty Panties, 2009.C-print.


ATSUHIRO ITO —

LIGHT AS PERCUSSION, LIGHT AS SOUND.


Similar to his sound tool, Atsuhiro Ito stands tall at a radiant intersection of possibilities. The possibilities of sound are crossed with those of the visual and aural – intersecting at a point that serves as a reminder of how new traditions take form; whether incidental or intentional. Through gesture, sound and the flickering light emanating during Ito’s performances, one would not find them-selves completely in the dark by considering particular aspects confrontational. “It’s not meant to be violent,” Ito tells me in one of our ongoing series of interviews. “Fluorescent lights are usually ceiling mount-ed but since I’m holding one in my hands, it may be taken as a bit unnatural, and that may lead to some peculiar responses. I’m not surprised if the sounds and visuals come off as strong, if you flash people up close with a fluorescent light in a dark club, sure, that could be construed as confrontational, but not in a physical way. I’m not trying to ex-press violence, but I do know I want to show that things you would normally see in an everyday context can be viewed differently.” To disarm any sense of confrontation, Ito does make an effort to connect with his audience. More than simply greeting,

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Ito haphazardly warns of the potential of induced epileptic attacks from his perfor-mances, in particular at museums and galleries. “I’m not trying to create a nega-tive music, or a induce that type of mood. I’ve seen enough of that – there’s plenty of it out there.”

Disclaimers aside, Ito continues to clarify, “the Optron is actually more light as percus-sion than anything- it functions well whenaccompanied with more traditional percus-sion because it can’t hold long tones, one trigger yields one burst so I can find my way into rhythms if I want.” Ito has made scant references to rhythms in his music and con-ferred his appreciation for we may painfully classify as “world music” yet in practice, Ito’s performances are devoid of any linear context. There is no sense of composi-tion, the beginnings and endings of what would normally be considered “songs“ are truncated. No interludes. No stage banter. These are the hallmarks of an Optron per-formance and Ito reminded me that, “there’s little room for subjectivity.”

As our discussion progressed, I couldn’t help but posit that Ito’s performances transcends the boundaries of what would be defined as “musique concrète”. Indeed, curious listen-ers almost always approach Ito afterwards to obtain an understanding of how the Optron works or came into being. In a standard response, Ito discovered the potential when noticing how the fluorescent lights in his stu-dio were affected by the altering of frequen-cies on an old radio transistor. After realizing that the frequencies could be picked up by micro-receptors, Ito implanted them into the light tube. After a few prototypes, earlier models of which were distance-manipulated via remote control, Ito decided to pick it up and handle the light himself. The spaces were the young artist had his exhibited first installations played host to the first improvi-sational performances.

What the object actually is, is debatable, but Ito insists on referring to it as an sound tool. Ito jests about nomenclature and chance processes as we continue our coffee, “you

could call it a sculptural object or an instru-ment, but remember they are designed differently: a sculpture stands upright, but is static. With the live performances I move the Optron and control it in a way atypical of ‘sculpture’... I’m controlling it but I’m not actually ‘in control.’ There are small changes every time I perform, from the PA, the engineer in the space and the effectors I’ll employ.” Ito is focused on the sonic potenti-alities of his Optron, discovery of what it can do is an ongoing process that is deployed in a loose trajectory with the assortment of formats in which he performs as a member of OFFSEASON, Optrum and with vener-able avant garde jazz guitarist, Kazuo Imai. “When I perform in the Kazuo Imai Trio, where we play standards with a bit of impro-visation, I’m more in control, as the perfor-mance is established by Imai as more linear.”

When cornered to discuss his approach, Ito elaborates, “it’s raw but what I’m doing is not a style issue and it shouldn’t be inter-preted that way. It’s simple, sure, but in terms of style, the format could be maybe rock, though traditional ’rock’ isn’t neces-sarily ‘me.’ If you had to explain it, it’s ‘rock,’ but I don’t really care about the style of rock and the trappings associated with it. The big difference between a typical rock concert and one of my performance is that there isn’t a story associated with what I do.”

The impetus lies in an adventure in sound forIto, fueled by a personal curiosity to arrive at new places that we may not be able to call“music”, to find a place where the sound and the art are not separated and the interac-tions themselves are fluid boundaries. This is an artist unconcerned with Western values in art. However, Ito comfortably acknowledges he’s highly influenced by the DIY and Folk movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s, includ-ing the work of light-artist Dan Flavin, which have all solidified Ito’s ethos and sensibility for an artistic practice which is characteristi-cally borderless. “A lot of artists at the time were transcending boundaries between their disciplines- artist’s were writing, musicians were making art, writers were making films, painters were making sculptures. Everyone

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Atsuhiro Ito.Optron Sound System Ver. 04, 2004.Mixed Media.Photo by Tama Art University Museum.

believed in being limitless and just express-ing themselves in any way they wanted to. Most people know I’m a painter and a musi-cian, moreso a musician because it’s what I’m doing more of, and I don’t care, it’s all one big thing.”

“If you think of Einstürzende Neubauten and how they reframed urban folk, I’d like to think that what I’m doing is along those lines. Using the fluorescent light is like a form of urban folklore too. Folk music has to be there at every moment, with each generation, that’s why the traditions of blues and folk are still here today and still exist.”

Today, fluorescent lights are everywhere, analmost undetectable aspect of daily life. Our cities would be different if they were to rem-ain off. The sounds of the city can be pretty lifeless but that is exactly what Ito suggests of his Optron, “it’s the sound of the [indus-trial] city and doesn’t really have the more humanist characteristics or catharsis a harp or cello does. But think about the steel pan orchestras in Trinidad and Tobago, they are still playing the traditional carnivals and have been for centuries. They’re still primitive in that they’ve been around for ages but they are orchestrated and performed in a vastly modern day context. The Optron is just sim-pler. As we try to balance the primitive and the modern, I remind Ito of a quotation from seminal Japanese cult noise act Hijokaidan: “Noise is the final stage of rock music.” Ito responds, “JoJo Hiroshige was right, but I would say that noise is actually the first stage of music. If you dissect rock music, you can see some primitive elements, think about the history of instruments, they all have one. The guitar has evolved for years, just like the trumpet. Everything is so systematic, and how well it works is worth a wait. Things naturally find a balance with their environ-ments until they need to evolve again. With the Optron, I’m not thinking about fixing or changing it. All that I can do is try to use it in as many different ways as possible and explore the possibilities on my own.”

Atsuhiro Ito lives and works in Tokyo.www.gotobai.net

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Atsuhiro Ito.Optron Sound System Ver. 04, 2004.Mixed Media.Photo by Tama Art University Museum.

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interested in Africa for some time, since even before I made My Imaginary Lagos where I juxtaposed photographs of Lagos an acquaintance of mine gave me, with photographs that I had that I could associate with them. What I’m interested in are not the giraffes and the lions, but the cities in Africa. I knew from my own experi-ence of Lagos, which I ended up actually visiting, that it’s difficult to find information about African cities other than that they’re dangerous. I wanted to be open for a fresh experience. So I intentionally avoided searching for information about Nairobi on the Internet. In a way, the process of getting to know Nairobi itself turned into a work.

For the first ten days or so, all I did was scan the city, including the people, the things around me, everything. That’s when I saw the billboard and newspaper stands that I used for my project. With the newspaper project I produced my own newspaper by painting over newspapers and photocopy-ing them and I sold them in a newspaper stand in the city. The billboard project was inspired by this empty billboard that stood inside Kibera, one of the largest slums in

IN CONVERSATION —

TEPPEI KANEUJI &MEGUMI MATSUBARA

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Moderated & written by Naoki Matsuyama

Naoki Matsuyama (NM): When I was asked to moderate this conversation, I couldn’t immediately imagine how to go about it because I had an image of your works as being very different. For instance, Megumi’s works tend to rely on the presence of other people. The name she gave for her archi-tectural practice, Assistant, is emblematic of that. On the other hand, Teppei’s works remind me of a child playing alone, which is an expression that Teppei has often used in the past. But on closer scrutiny, I began to see underlying similarities. Today I’d like to explore such differences and similarities with you, so that we can perhaps glimpse the way two Japanese artists of the same generation were formed and continue to give expres-sion to their ideas.

Megumi, you just came back from Nairobi, Kenya. What brought you to Nairobi and what did you do there?

Working from scratch in unknown places

Megumi Matsubara (MM): I stayed in Nairobi for a month for an artist residency organized by a Japanese artist. I’ve been


Africa. I ended up making an installation with everyday objects and photographs I took but what was interesting was the process of discovering the history and politics behind that billboard as I talked to people to get permissions and so on. It all began just because I found those empty billboards strange, and wanted to do something with them.

NM: How does that relate to the way you work, Teppei?

Teppei Kaneuji (TK): I’m also often invited to work abroad and produce a work from scratch at the place and to destroy it before I leave.

MM: Destroy it?

Above.Megumi Matsubara.A White Line, 2009.DV video 3 min, 37 sec.

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Previous page.Teppei Kaneuji.White Discharge (Built-up Objects #3), 2009.Mixed media.© Teppei Kaneuji.Courtesy of ShugoArts.


TK: Yes, I guess that’s to save money. I’ve worked in many places, especially in Asia, and most of the times I don’t know anything about the place. I start from imagining what kind of place it is. And even after I get there, I don’t do proper research. I just try to be faithful to the things I feel or see. For instance, just by shopping for things and looking at the things I buy, it’s possible to discern something that makes the place particular. In a way I seek a connection with society through things, or the relation-ship between myself and other things and spaces. I’m interested in what emerges out of that. I’m not very good with dealing with other people, so I tend to focus on my own small activities. Well, I can only work that way. By focusing on a small sphere of activity and letting something come out of it. I just

try to be honest to what feels real to me. But at the same time, I’m really drawn to what Megumi just described because it feels more open to possibilities for something personal to connect with a wider context like history.

Working with others

MM: What I felt while I actively sought contact with people in Nairobi, well, what I’ve been feeling for a long time but felt particularly strongly there, is that I’m really empty. Really empty. I was born and grew up in the city and words like roots don’t reso-nate with me. I feel like I’m floating. I feel like I’m nothing without other people, or things other than my own self. I’m just like a mirror in a way, and can’t do or make anything without the input from other people and

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things. So nothing happens for me if I just keep on looking at things. It’s only through communicating and allowing other people’s lives to enter my own that I’m able to take action. I don’t allow theory to have prece-dence and I accept the multiple layers of things and people in the city to lead me.

NM: Teppei, you tend to work by yourself but you also have experience of working with others, though much more rarely. What is it like for you to work with others?

TK: Yes, even now I’m involved in a project with photographers and another one with a stage director who asked me to produce a stage set. I do have a yearning for something like that chemical reaction that results from communicating with people, but I’m just not very good at it. I almost have to force myself to do it. The way I work is similar to making collages: it’s to see other people as materials I can use and to ask them to see myself as a material too. I’m told that’s a very dry way of thinking about collaboration, but for me it’s the only way to work in a sincere manner.

Working with others is sometimes pain-ful and shocking. People have completely different methodologies and what you do may not be accepted. But I like that sense of misalignment, of things not going the way I wish them to. It’s only natural that other people may do something that doesn’t make sense to me. And I include such misunder-standings to create “collages”. It’s exactly the same with my sculptural works. I stack everyday objects together and cover them with powders and resin. These materials are very difficult to control, and I actively let that lack of control to enter my works.

Emptiness, blank space & absence NM: Megumi mentioned “emptiness” earlier. That reminds me of the expression “blank space” that you use, especially in relation to the series White Discharge that you just described.

TK: Yes, I can understand what Megumi

was talking about very well. I share that feeling of rootlessness and of having nothing inside myself. It’s a very strong feeling that drives me when I produce works. I guess I’m trying to fill up that void or empty space with things. I start by doing stuff with things around me, and end up covering them in white to make them formless in a way, so that I can start to deal with emptiness itself as an object. It’s very important for me that my starting point is blank space. And I believe there are many states of blankness.

MM: For me, emptiness can be something that is created when you overturn a structure. To take a simple example, I’m interested in words not just for their meaning but also for their dimensions or visual qualities. By treating words purely based on their visual quality, and forgetting about grammatical structure, some kind of emptiness of meaning, or what I call absence, occurs. I’m not interested in a state where A equals B, but rather in one which by random-ly placing A and B, some kind of blank space is generated between them. That space belongs to no one and precedes anyone’s definition. It’s just something that’s there.

Using everyday objects

NM: You mentioned that you used every-day objects in your project in Nairobi, and this relates to Teppei’s works too. Do you use those objects to create the in-between spaces that you just mentioned?

MM: Each object carries different images with it. There’s an infinite list of hidden mean-ings behind a scarf or a pair of shoes. It’s just like with the connotation of words, like the word “red” having different layers of associa-tions and meanings. For me everyday objects are merely an example of things that carry different meanings, and I use them just like a painter uses paints. Words, objects, they are the same for me. They’re just like paints.

TK: I understand that and I might just be repeating what you just said, but I like taking things that have a meaning somewhere as something useful, and putting them in a

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different context. I like creating that feeling in which the world as you know it is suddenly distorted. To put it very simply, I feel that by taking something that was part of the composition of the world, you can easily and immediately establish a connec-tion. And when I collect things according to a rule or system that I defined, the meaning that an object used have becomes void and the object is given a new role.

NM: What kind of rules or systems do you set for yourself?

TK: For example, if I decide that I’m go-ing to stack objects high, I’d collect things regardless of their color or use, and focus on whether something can be used as a pillar or not. Or sometimes I would just collect trans-parent things, regardless of their material.

I always had this habit of collecting things. I guess I started using everyday objects for the simple reason that they were there. With Teen Age Fan Club for example, I used the hair part of anime figures partly because they were a very familiar part of my child-hood and I happened to have a few, just like any guy of my generation. The figures come from different animes and video games, are made by different people and present diverse scales. But they can all be associated due to the fact that they’re all figures, and by combining the hair parts, I was able to create this one mass that looks like a crea-ture but which also lacks a sense of agency.

A White Line & Midnight in a Box

NM: Let’s talk about the works in this show. Megumi, could you tell us a little about A White Line?

MM: I was asked to carry out a ten-day workshop at Tokyo Wonder Site with stu-dents in the summer of 2009.

They had this theme of making participants experience the condition of garbage in Tokyo before making a work. They took us on a tour of disposal plants and dump-sites. I’m not sure how important that was to the

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Megumi Matsubara.Stra, 2011.Photocopied newspapers. Installation view in front of Kenya National Archives, Nairobi.


choice of using toilet paper, but I some-how decided to use it and do something in Shibuya. It was more of an instinctive perfor-mance. I crossed the Shibuya crossing with a toilet paper in my hand that rolled out onto the street, and I was followed by two others who crossed each other.

Visiting those dump-sites made me think about the duration of things, the way they are so easily forgotten. I associated that with the crowded streets of Shibuya. When someone bumps on to us, we’re annoyed, but only for a brief moment and then we forget about it. A chaotic situation that at-tracted our attention ceases to matter the next instant. But the performance itself was very simple and was improvised on the spot. It was a one-time performance that lasted a mere three minutes.

NM: The ephemeral movement of A White Line seems to be in strong contrast to the great stillness of Midnight in a Box which is also a video work. It strikes me as a departure from your past works Teppei.

TK: It’s a recent work. I started dealing with video since my solo show at the Yokohama Museum of Art. I tend to start with small things to conjure up images of big things or to connect them with big spaces. But I do also have a yearning for gigantic sculpture or architecture and I felt that I could handle that kind scale if I were to use video. When I made my first animation work in which I portrayed a building or a big mass, I really had a sense that I could do something that I couldn’t do otherwise.

With Midnight in a Box, there was a period in which I would record or photograph the after-hours broadcast that shows footage of the city taken from a fixed camera. I always have the TV on at home and since I often work until the early hours, I was very familiar with the images. But one day, as I was look-ing from time to time at the footage on the TV that showed lights going on and off, or cars passing by, or even the sky brighten-ing up in the morning, I had the feeling that the small space of my room was connected

with the large spaces of the city. And then I watched the footage at a later day and something stranger happened: it felt as if the movements in the cities, and my own experiences that I could recall, were turned into an object. That’s why I chose to project the footage into a box, to treat the enormity of the city as an object.

Art in post-quake Japan

NM: One thing that we must talk about before we wrap up this conversation is the earthquake that shook Japan on March 11. I’m struggling to find words to talk about it but I feel that this event caused a definite rift in the way we envisage our “everyday life”. Do you think that this event that’s still unfolding in the form of a nuclear crisis will have an effect on your works?

TK: In my case, I don’t think there’ll be a major change. The reason I say this is because what I have been doing in the past encompassed an event like this in some ways. I’m not saying that I predicted it. I just mean that I always dealt with the possibility of something being engulfed by a large phenomenon. For me the everyday included the possibility that the meaning of things may suddenly be upset. So I don’t think I’ll change my style in any obvious way.

I know that my works may be associated visually with the events, although of course there’s no direct connection because they were made before anything happened. But I believe that everything that I made is po-tentially connected with anything that could happen in reality. In a sense everything is related. You used the term “everyday life” but I believe that the concept of the “every-day” itself must be updated. The word itself may no longer be appropriate. I think we need to acquire a new conception of it.

MM: I haven’t directly experienced the earthquake because I was in the slums in Kibera when it happened. It was a strange twist of fate for me to experience the earth-quake in Japan through the experience of being in the slums. There’s a pretty harsh

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reality in the slums: enormous amounts of garbage, unbelievable things being burned constantly and so on. But everyone would ask me if I were okay when they found out I was Japanese.

I could only think about Japan through the slum. I felt that the way the Japanese economy has been deteriorating and the way these African cities were growing energetically had finally met at one point. It was a strange feeling, being told by people that they wanted to become as prosperous as Japan, when Japan was facing so many problems that were made even worse by the earthquake. I felt very concretely, and this might be something peculiar to my generation, that the two countries may be at the same point but moving along vectors pointing towards opposite directions. I don’t think the

earthquake will have a fundamental impact on my work. For me, the only thing I can donot to panic and lose sight of my daily life is to continue to create, to connect with people. Only that, if you like, would update our conception of the everyday. Only the feeling that we are connected, that we can create, will give us the ability to create the “everyday” whatever may happen.

NM: Thank you both.

Megumi lives and works in Tokyo both as an artist and as one half of architecture studio Assistant. www.megumimatsubara.com

Teppei Kaneuji lives and works in Kyoto and is represented by ShugoArts. www.shugoarts.com

Teppei Kaneuji.Midnight in a Box, 2001/2010.Plastic box, DVD video, 2 h, 1 min, 45 sec.© Teppei Kaneuji.Courtesy of ShugoArts.

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YOTARO NIWA

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Questionnaire by Antonin Gaultier

Yotaro Niwa.Spatial Causality, 2009.Mixed media.


Questionnaire

For Pacific, you have decided to make a site-specific installation.Is it important to react to a given environment?Yes, my work is the accumulation of reactions.

Often everyday objects are used as source material. Why?I think it’s just because various situations of our everyday livesmotivate my creativity. What interests me is the discrepancy or gap between a motivating situation and the product of the art. This appears in the process and helps develop the work every time.

There is a sense of playfulness in your work, as if you wereplaying with the expectations of the audience. Is disruption a goal?To form multiple associations and clear questions at the same time.To make people launch into a circuit of free thought.Such things I try to do at making art now.

What was your original idea with your installations?Multiple ideas are intertwined. To say that it came from one ideawould not do the series justice.

Is improvisation and accident important in your work?Improvisation and accidents cannot be completely eliminated from any work, but for me it is important.

We chose a very generic name for the show, (almost) on purpose.What does Pacific means to you?As a child I read the diary of a man who sailed from Japan to America alone. For him it was a personal challenge to achieve a dream. This is what Pacific means to me.

Yotaro Niwa lives and works in Berlin.

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Yotaro Niwa.Spatial Causality, 2009.Mixed media.

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TAKASHI SUZUKI

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Questionnaire by Antonin Gaultier


Questionnaire

What was your original idea with this series?At first, I was just surprised and intrigued by the texture, color and the variety of form – and the array of sponges at the store – even though they are just simple objects used for washing dishes. I simply wanted to challenge myself to find how many sculptural forms I can create by using assemblages of these particular mundane items.

I am interested in your choice of source material. Was it important to start with daily objects?I believe daily objects are symbols and reflections of capitalism, mate-rialism, economical and political activity – as well as a concrete form of our lives’ and societies’ desire. To select, choose, judge and compare objects; and then to make a good diagnosis of objects themselves is an important and provocative act of art. It promotes a differentiation of context, instilling potentially unexpected propositions.

Upon observation, the objects/subjects in your work take a different meaning. What do you want to reveal?I think that an image that one perceives is dependent upon one’s ethnic or cultural background, or even visual experience, as our world has col-lapsed when we think of the time/space continuum. Through my work, I am exploring how photographic images are perceived, and how a viewer processes visual information according to one’s memory. I want to create photographs that make you feel as though you are seeing something totally different from the person next to you.

Is improvisation and accident important in your work?All images of Bau are attempts at re-visualizing images that were in my mind prior: images from daily personal memories, photographs from magazines, and images from television or the internet. Of course, there is always something popping in my mind when I construct sponge assemblies, but I’ve never made any representative structures. It’s a chance process with the end result of creating a new visual vocabulary by interpreting mundane objects.

We chose a very generic name for the show, (almost) on purpose. What does Pacific means to you?The world has never been and never will be “pacific”. If it was, it would be boring.

Takashi Suzuki lives and works in Kyoto and is represented by Super Window Project gallery. www.takashisuzuki.com

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Takashi Suzuki.ARCA 1209-K, 2008.Inkjet print.

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Above.Takashi Suzuki.ARCA 0715-R, 2008.Inkjet print.

Right.Takashi Suzuki.Bau, 2010.C-print photo series.Courtesy of Takashi Suzuki & Super Window Project.


Above.Takashi Suzuki.ARCA 0715-R, 2008.Inkjet print.

Right.Takashi Suzuki.Bau, 2010.C-print photo series.Courtesy of Takashi Suzuki & Super Window Project.

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This page.Yuri Suzuki.Color Chaser, 2010.Mixed media.Photo by Hitomi Kai Yoda.

Left.Takashi Suzuki.Bau #0998, 2010.C-print.Courtesy of Takashi Suzuki & Super Window Project.

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Megumi Matsubara & Otieno Kota.Stra, 2011.Billboard installation in Kibera, Nairobi.


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Above.Teppei Kaneuji.Muddy Stream from a Mug #6, 2006.Mixed media.© Teppei Kaneuji.Courtesy of ShugoArts.

Left.Teppei Kaneuji.Muddy Stream from a Mug #8, 2006.Mixed media.© Teppei Kaneuji.Courtesy of ShugoArts.

Right.Teppei Kaneuji.Hakuchizu, 2009.Plaster, tables, etc.© Teppei Kaneuji.Courtesy of ShugoArts.


Above.Motoyuki Daifu.The Family is a Pubis, So I Cover It With Pretty Panties, 2009.C-print.

Left.Yotaro Niwa.Hygrometer #3, 2011.Mixed media.

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A bright blue plastic sheet is the first item.It is ubiquitous, cheap (¥105), and durable;it keeps out the rain. This first materialcan be supplemented with found pieces ofwood, metal, and plastic to build a small, but functional, mobile shelter; a bricolage of throwaway things, resolved into a well engineered domicile and inhabited by a man (almost 90% of Japan’s homeless are men). At this moment that man might be watching a television powered with solar panels (or car batteries), cooking a small meal on a gas burner, or sleeping on a makeshift bed of cardboard. Homeless shacks made in this fashion can be seen as you walk along the banks of Tokyo’s

largest rivers: the Tamagawa, Sumidagawaand Arakawa. These riverbanks are Tokyo’s zones of contested governance; look at satellite images of these riverbanks and you’ll see major expressways rammed with new cars paying tolls to drive across Tokyo and below, in the shadow of those roads, you’ll see small patches of bright blue. Here men can live for free (almost) between the gaps in Tokyo housing laws, just out of the line of sight of Japanese society. One after-noon, Kyohei Sakaguchi looked me in the eyes and said, “If you want to be happy then you should go to the river.”

Born in 1978, Kyohei lives and works in

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KYOHEI SAKAGUCHI—

DOWN BY THE RIVER, I BUILT MY SHELTER

Written by Cameron McKeanPhotography by Kyohei Sakaguchi


Western Tokyo as an architect, activist and writer. He is married, has a son and a daughter and is best known as the author of a book entitled Zero Yen House. In that book heexplained the structures built by Tokyo’s homeless population, giving curren-cy to the idea that they might be appropri-ately viewed as significant forms of human engineering and architecture. But Zero Yen House was published in 2004, and now, over five years have passed. During those years Kyohei’s ideas about construction and architecture have become sidelined by ideas about living itself. We talked about these ideas in a small cafe at a suburban station on the Chuo line. During the late ‘60s this train line was home to the full spectrum of Japan’s activist community, from terror-ist groups to ecological poets. “This cafe used to be one of the places those old guys would meet. It’s quiet here and I like the owner so I use the space for my meetings or projects.” It seems appropriate.

Educated as an architect at the prestigeous Waseda University, Sakaguchi is now much more appropriately placed within a lineage of Japanese activism than architecture. This lineage includes people like Kyushu’s non-interventionist farmer Masanobu Fukuoka who resisted government policy on using agricultural chemicals, or people like wandering poet Nanao Sakaki who spent his life outdoors, happily poor, or people like Hajime Matsumoto who helped found the Amateur Riot Group in Koenji, which recently organized the only public protest against nuclear power in Japan following the catastrophic failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors.

Taking from the poor and giving to the white cube

Whether he embraces it or not, activism is the framework Kyohei’s work should be viewed within. His decision to call himself an “architect” only helps to make his activ-ism more unusual and more potent. “I think art has to change society,” says Kyohei, “Takashi Murakami might be the most famous Japanese artist but I think he’s a

craftsman, not an artist. Fine art is now only about buying and selling products.

Of course art is sometimes commercial, but I believe it should also be revolutionary. I want to explore art which is directly joined to society, influencing the government, the people, law and economics.” To this end Kyohei’s work deals with the structures homeless people build. He has written about them, photographed them, exhibited examples of them abroad and lived in them himself. “I made a house with parts from a home centre. It cost about two hundred dollars. I made it with my homeless friend, he is my teacher, and we made it together in 24 hours. This is a house but under the law it’s technically a vehicle because I put wheels on it.” This strategy is an important one, but more about navigating housing laws later. The important point to remem-ber with building a homeless shack is that Kyohei has a larger, “real” house elsewhere. He built the shack as an exercise in under-standing minor architecture. “The house is a mistake,” he says “constructing houses is only about money. There are other ways to live, incredibly cheap ways.”

But he is not the first to bring the world of the dispossessed into the world of contem-porary art. In 2009 German art-director Mike Meiré worked with kitchen manufac-turer Dornbracht to exhibit “impoverished kitchens” from around the world. Whole stalls and shacks were purchased from their owners and reassembled in a gallery, a “classic white cube”, to “explore the sculp-tural quality of authentic objects and their cultural identity,” according to Meiré’s web-site. It seems the journey between the world of poverty and the world of contemporary art is fraught with danger. Minor artifacts from the outside world cannot be placed in the white cube with their innocence intact, they become fetishes, or worse, products. Graffiti’s journey from the street to the gallery is a good example: what thrived as minor expression outdoors died in the hands of major collectors during the mid ‘80s (the cycle repeated again over the past five years) as a commodity.

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Architect dreams of immaterial space

Poverty is many things; an economic reality, a state of mind, and sometimes, as with Meiré’s work, it is also a style, something to fetishize. I ask Kyohei whether he is worried that Tokyo’s homeless shacks might become fashionable, with the political, social and economic issues they harbour erased. “I love fashion,” Kyohei says, “fashion can be a way to trap people. It’s my plan for people to be taken in the style of the work. One mobile house I built was painted white and it had a large circular window. It was for office ladies. At first they just need to try it. Fashion is a trap. They’ll change after they experience.”

This is the central tenet of all Kyohei’s work, lived experience. “I guess my work is here, in my head. I never stop thinking. When I am in bed at night, that is my happiest time. Before I fall asleep, I’m still thinking within reality, but just before I begin to dream I tryto imagine, to make, future architecture asI fall asleep. I close my eyes and make a shape, first I make myself; I make a body. I begin walking and I meet with someone, maybe it’s the mayor, and we discuss plans to build something, deeper and deeper with more reality, and then I’m making books and I imagine receiving emails from someone who runs a gallery in Berlin, they want me to do a show. Like this. The dream is a no money space. People can go anywhere directly, it is a truly free space.”

The problem is, of course, that it’s not real. But this quote shows Kyohei’s obses-sion with experience. It is something which demarcates his work from others who bring impoverished artifacts and perspectives into contemporary art, to actually experience something akin to homelessness. Kyohei has lived in a carpark, on the banks of the Tamagawa river and is currently working on building a mobile home and living beside Tokyo’s most popular park. Blue plastic sheets were and will be involved in all these projects; not for any stylistic reason but simply because they’re cheap and durable and keep out the rain. Unfortunately they cannot keep out the police. They once told

Kyohei he could not live in a parking space (even though his home had wheels and was technically a vehicle). “I asked them, What is living? Please make a law to tell me what living is, so I can check whether I am actually living in this space.”

Living homeless is a relatively new realityfor Japan’s disenfranchised citizens. Home-lessness only really emerged following Japan’s deep recession during the ‘90s. But today there are at least 20,661 men, 749women and 3,886 persons of “undeter-mined gender” who are living on the streets, in parks and beside rivers accord-ing to a 2003 survey. These are the official numbers, but most researchers set the actual figures much higher. Sloppy data gathering, e.g. “undetermined gender”, led many to believe the official testers were not particularly rigorous.

Why homelessness is rising in an advanced nation like Japan has, according to one research article entitled Japan’s New Home-less, little to do with crumbling employment systems or broken family ties and is simply a reflection that Japan has reached the limit to its affluence. Strangely (perhaps due to national pride, genuine/willful ignorance, bureaucratic befuddlement) Japan’s home-less population is only addressed lightly in national policy. The 1950 Livelihood Protec-tion Law requires each citizen to have an acceptable standard of “civilized living,” and Article 25 of Japan’s Constitution states that “all people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living. In all spheres of life, the State shall use its endeavors for the promo-tion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health.” But in reality the homeless, as outsiders, seem to be left to fend for themselves on the margins and both sides appear relatively complacent with this. The Japanese are renowned for their equanimity but here that calm spirit comes across as a morbid desire for continued disenfranchisement; the downtrodden and displaced appear resigned to their place in the world, down low.


Sleeping with the hierarchy

So I ask Kyohei what his work does to address inequality, power and hierarchies. “I know my work looks non-hierarchies. It looks as though i’m opposing hierarchies. But I love hierarchies. I love the rich and the poor.” Unexpected answer. “If the govern-ment says ‘get off‘ then the homeless just move on, they’re nomads. It’s a moving system. Often the authorities will give them warning; enough time to pack up their homes during an inspection. More power-ful people ask the less powerful people to move; they don’t fight, they just move.” In Japan, homelessness is about adaptability, about living between states, between having and not having, between living in shelter and living exposed, between being a human and a citizen, “I want to make something in the gaps. The brain always separates things into two ways, but we need to see with more resolution. It’s not a straight line, everything is in constant flux. I don’t believe we need to change any sys-tems. Never change the system or the law but only change your thinking. Then maybe real change can come much later. I see the homeless as leaders, they never demand changes in the system. To them Tokyo is a great jungle and they have developed unique maps to navigate that space. Flexibil-ity is life, but people have forgotten that.”

I wondered if these maps and systems might be the source of that happiness which Kyohei promised I would find beside the river. To know new pathways through a city, new zones of experiences, new ways of living (between, rather than in). It’s starting to sound promising. Taken far enough, this line of thinking ends with a deliberate, rather than a forced, migration to the river. In an academic article entitled Homelessness as a Lifestyle, there is a list which brings into focus the realities of such a choice. The aspects of life reserved for outsiders and the homeless: “stabbing and gunshot wounds, inflicted and received, unknown children, ill health, sporadic employment, gangs, alcohol abuse, impulsiveness, adoption, immigration, cultural clashes, welfare...

disability benefits, work programs, halluci-nations, hard drugs, forgery, large gaps in memory, depression, state and city mental hospitals, prisons, distant and broken families, thievery, the con game, passivity, counterfeiting, pseudonyms and lastly, all under the heading of disaffiliation.” There is no joy in such a list.

Trying to locate the source of Kyohei’s conviction, I read a book by German Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called The Sane Society, within is a chapter titled Alienation Under Capitalism, from which there is a paragraph which I have decided to end this essay with:

“Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more power-less he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself. He has built a golden calf, and says ‘These are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt’.”

Let us go to the river then and build a blue house and say, “This is my house. It has brought me back from the dead; brought me out of servitude to machines, to work and to money. And now that I think about it, that’s quite incredible actually, consider-ing I made it in about day, just out of cheap plastic and scrap wood.”

Bibliography

Ezawa, Aya. Japan’s New Homeless, from Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless. Vol. 11, No. 4 (2002).

Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society (1956). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Grunberg, Jeffrey. Homelessness as a Lifestyle, from Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless. Vol. 7, No. 4 (1998).

Kyohei Sakaguchi lives and works in Tokyo and Kumamoto. www.0yenhouse.com

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PMKFA

Questionnaire by Ian Lynam

PMKFA.The Key to Dead Formats, 2011.Pencil on paper.


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Questionnaire

You tend to work in a hybrid digital/analog fashion – has that always been your working methodology?I would say that my method has always been to do things any other way than the easy one. Due to this, I started bumping into methods of work-ing that helped foster the development of a personal visual language. It’s still a real thread in my work, mixing techniques that camouflage the tools used, and due to that, I can shift perception.

What was the idea behind the drawings for Pacific?One day a couple of months ago I started drawing like lightning from a blue sky. I had never drawn with intent, but started making these still life studies of objects around me at home by the kitchen table.I found a strong dramatic effect in rendering glass, for example, in a way, it was like dead matter becoming alive in a way, pulling vitality out of an inherent mundanity, something that is amplified by a, more or less, totally digitized visual world.

Your work has political elements which is often not overt, are those elements in older work intentionally obfuscated? Lately you’ve seemed to embrace highly politicized projects, any reason for this turn?It’s not really a turn. I still have no interest in bringing political ele-ments into my commercial work, though lately I’ve started a couple of self-initiated projects in this direction. The most significant of them being a book called Power, where I illustrate world leaders from the past 50 years and pair them with a quote that in my opinion make them more human. Because they’re all humans with all the weaknesses and shortcomings that come with that. The events in the Middle East have caused some texts to change from “current leader” to “former leader”.

Your perspective is decidedly international in scope, yet the past few years you’ve been relentlessly pursuing an intimate knowledge of the American political sphere, despite residing in Japan. Why?My focus of analysis shifts periodically, right now it’s the US. I simply want to understand that system, and in global affairs you cannot get around the US. When, if ever, Japanese politics stop being so cynical and excluded from it’s people I will turn my attention to it, but I don’t see that hap-pening anytime soon.

What, for you, is Pacific?I grew up far inland in a small city in Sweden, so I never had a very close or natural relationship with the sea. But as I started moving around something I enjoyed was to discover new “neighbors”. As your center shifts what used to be remote now is next door. Since I moved to Tokyo the Pacific Ocean is my new ‘hood friend.

PMKFA lives and works in Tokyo. www.pmkfa.com

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Yuri Suzuki’s speculative body of work to date in the field of hybrid product design/art covers a lot of aural territory. His method-ologies are wide-ranging – incorporating interactive audio into objects previously unregarded for their musical worth; de-, then re-constructing existing musical technologies to bring out innate aspects of

Yuri Suzuki.White Noise Machine, 2009.Mixed media.Photo by Yoriko Yamamura.

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YURI SUZUKI—

SOUND & PHYSICALITY

Written by Ian Lynam


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the experience of musical recognition; and experimenting with existing music formats in play-filled, thoughtful ways. Perhaps “play” is too strong a term, as his finished projects tend to rigorous in their application of elec-tronic acumen and usually a bit too finished to be just an end-product of a weekend cavort, but there is a joy that these objects induce that is akin to play in their examina-tion of sound.

Influential touchstones abound in Suzuki’s body of work, both in terms of people and products. His 2008 Sound Chaser project is highly akin to the mass-manufactured Vinyl Killer, a handheld toy car with a record player needle on it’s underside and a speaker in the roof that zips around phonograph records at 33rpm. With Suzuki’s project, vinyl records are broken into strips of curved track to be traversed by a minia-turized “train” engine. Instead of records (and the original musicians’ intentions) being left intact for mere playback, Suzuki offers a modular, deconstructed listening experience - spatial reconfiguration providing a variable compositional experience that at its core is participatory. By offering the ability to reconstruct the track that the Sound Chaser will follow, Suzuki offers up a social experi-ence with a multitude of outcomes that engages the audience, instead of merely being a playback device.

Suzuki’s obsession with the record player and analog sound reproduction owes a large debt to visual/sound artist Christian Marclay’s use of altered turntables and pre-pared records. References to vinyl phono-graphs pop up all over Suzuki’s catalog. His 2008 Prepared Turntable is a record player with five modular tone arms connected to a fader, controlling the volume for each chan-nel. The Finger Player, a project from the same year, is a stereophonic needle housing device with a hollow recession designed to fit around a human finger, inducing the ac-tive listener/participant to physically feel the sound that is carved into a record’s grooves.

Suzuki’s own words about his series of works interpreting phonograph technology:

In 1977, Nasa launched an unmanned scien-tific probe: the Voyager 1. This is now the far-thest human-made object from Earth, and it continues to travel away from both the Earth and the Sun at a relatively faster speed than any other probe. The spacecraft contains a gold-plated, copper phonograph record, commonly known as the “Voyager Golden Record”, which contains sounds and images that were selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, the sounds of Earth.

The record was placed on the Voyager 1 so that any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or perhaps humans in the distant future, may one day find it and learn about Earth.

Why did NASA choose the record as the media for this important mission? In 1977, the record was the most common recordable media for sound, but is that the only reason? It has been 30 years since the Golden Record was made and its survival in space is particu-larly significant to me as my work is centered around the theme of “sound and physical-ity”. Because of its physicality, the record has developed a new value and significance.

It could be said that the record is still the most modern, and the finest media in the field of analogue recording technology. The first gramophone recordings made over a hundred years ago have survived and can still be listened to today.

Technology has, however, “changed its track” from analogue to digital.

These days, most sounds are digitally record-ed. I personally feel uneasy about the digiti-zation of music and its reduction into “data”. When objects lose physicality they become virtual, and I wonder if digitally-recorded music can survive generations in this state. My hope is that my projects will provoke people’s interest in physical music media.

This series of works aims to help people re-appreciate sound and its physicality.

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development company/artist group Maywa Denki has inevitably influenced his ascen-sion. The pop playfulness with which Maywa Denki1 have surrounded their efforts are mirrored in Suzuki’s output, though he has eschewed their determination to cast their various initiatives under a commercial ban-ner. This is where Suzuki’s work veers more into left-field, showing itself as a body of work which primarily resides in exhibition spaces instead of the marketplace.

Here, Suzuki’s work falls somewhat into what British educators Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have termed critical design, an ambiguous, amorphous design exploration that “uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconcep-tions and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”2 While Dunne, Raby, and proponents of critical design experi-ment with “designs that pander to the bad side of people, appealing to contradictory and irrational emotions”3, Suzuki inverts this underlying philosophy, providing a series of explorative works that embodying a critique of the contemporary evolution of music while embracing the “sunny side of the street”, simultaneously side-stepping the marketplace in his personal works.4

Suzuki’s collaborative work The Love Machine with Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad and Households for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Village Fete in 2008 took the form of a stereotypically romantic set dining

table and a pair of chairs fitted with bicycle pumps in the seats. By hopping up and down, pumping the chair assembly, a pair of heart-shaped balloons was inflated via an apparatus on the table. A sharp increase in volume, either participants screaming or one of the balloons popping, triggered a camera system that showed the dining lovers in a riotous moment of both courtship and competition, whose heart (balloon) would break first?

Of the projects which are displayed on Suzuki’s website, only a handful of older projects could be deemed marketable and seem to have mass production in mind. Not surprisingly, they are older works - dating from his time working for Maywa Denki in the early part of the last decade. CYPOT, a project from 2004, has a clearly prosocial bent in its expiration at maximizing the ef-ficiency of consumer-grade plastic bottles. By making his prototype a tetrahedral shape that is flat-sided, spatial storage is maxi-mized. When the contents are emptied, the bottle folds flat, making the environmental footprint smaller (at least spatially). His 2002 digital Flow Watch engages wearers to be more active in their desire to find out the time, users must wave their wrists in the air, a LED strip emitting the time in a series of activated cells that can be seen in light trails generated by the users motion. Then, there is a chair design, the GM Chair of 2002. In-debted to Canadian Jacques Guillon’s string chairs, Suzuki constructed a geometric steel

1 And sheer atavistic consumerist pandering, frankly. Maywa Denki’s latest offering en masse is a delightful instrument called the Otamatone, an anthropomorphic basic synthesizer with a squeezable head to offer vibrato and volume control. Accompany-ing its release is a Maywa Denki-sponsored promotional video for “おめでトーン♡ありがトーン” (Omede-tone♡Ariga-tone or literally - Congratulations-tone♡Thank you-tone) the girl group Nut pranc-ing about in minimal clothing sporting large-scale Otamatones. A third of the way through, there is a hard cut to the members clad in bikinis playing an Otamatone solo. (The rest of the song was not composed using an Otamatone as far as I can tell, as the Otamatone has an extremely limited range.)

2 Critical Design FAQ www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0

3 www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/DunneandRaby

4 My own interaction with the critical design thinking espoused by Dunne and Raby in personal experience was a large letdown after reading their provocative books Hertzian Tales (1999) and Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (2001). I walked away from an afternoon workshop with Raby with the same frustrated feeling I get every time a Mormon missionary takes up some of my time - like someone has tried to convert me to a way of thinking and living that I am not comfortable with as a daily mindstate. That being said, I think they are really smart folks and have a num-ber of great ideas, most notably (from the Critical Design FAQ):

One of critical Design’s roles is to question the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered through designed products. Design is assumed to only make things nice, it’s as though all designers have taken an unspoken Hippocratic oath, this limits and prevents us from fully engaging with and designing for the complexities of human nature which of course is not always nice.It’s been almost a decade since meeting Fiona Raby, and the details as to why I found her slant on thinking awkward are hazy, but mostly it revolves around my not believing that complexity and contradiction have to be so ill-natured. People are confused and contradictory every moment of the day (particularly designers).


Yuri Suzuki & Oscar Diaz.Rec & Play, 2010.Mixed media.Photos by Hitomi Kai Yoda.


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frame and suspended a loop of same latex-based material used to make rubber bands, offering a jiggly, floating experience of being suspended in air by a thin membrane.Forays into exploring devices which gener-ate white noise as a soothing phenomenon are a recurring element of Suzuki’s more recent works. Inspired by mothers’ use of ambient noise generated by household objects to amuse and pacify their offspring, Suzuki created a stylized megaphone called the Child Chiller in 2008. His 2009 project, White Noise Machine calculates the amount of street noise in a defined space and generates an equivalent amount of white noise, effectively drowning out distracting street noise. Utilizing a similar model to the destructive interference properties of noise-cancelling headphones, sans soundproofing, Suzuki has created an art object with practi-cal applications for high-traffic areas.

Home appliances themselves have made an appearance in his work. Examining the sonic properties of common doorbells, tea kettles and other domestic products that see daily use has inspired Suzuki to take up the cause of making households more melodic. Re-garding his 2008 Musical Kettle project:

One day I found great kettle designed by Richard Sapper. The kettle’s beautiful sound plays the notes C and D and sounds like small locomotive. Inspired by this, I made a kettle of my own – a musical kettle, which became part of the series “Re-design

Soundscape”. As the kettle boils it whistles your favorite tune… I want to contribute to the design of daily domestic noises: alarms, mobile phones, a doorbell; I have the opin-ion that not enough thought has been given to the noises they produce.

REC & PLAY, Suzuki’s collaborative project with fellow RCA graduate Oscar Diaz was created with the intention to cast an object capable of combining mark-making and sound. The projects consists of two ele-ments: a “REC” pen with a built-in micro-phone-based recording head which transfers the sound to a custom ferromagnetic ink which flows through the pen’s nib onto a de-sired surface; and a “PLAY” pen-like reader with a cassette tape head built into the nib which can be dragged across the marked surface, feeding the magnetic sound signal into a speaker at the pen’s top. Suzuki embodies the internationalist, free-wheelingly multi-disciplinary RCA design ethos shared by his frequent collaborators Åbäke, a four-person international collec-tive whose varied projects include running a record label, fashion house, teaching and directing an occasional magazine (deemed a “parasite” publication, as it is only published within the physical context of other maga-zines), alongside their graphic design service provider roles. Their collaborative exhibi-tions under the Suzuki Åffice moniker offer up investigations of spatial relationships, social constructs, corporate entity-forming/maintaining, and product packaging.

5 Or they are just lazy. I am not sure which. Their designed projects just always sport a lack of finish which I find frustrating. Seeing their early designed work when I was myself a young designer excited me as it felt more raw and “true to materials”, but revisit-ing their work over the past few years, their projects tend not to age gracefully, feeling somewhat rushed and slapped-together. This is not going to be a popular opinion, but that being said, they are lovely people. I just wonder what their work would look like if it was more rigorous.

6 I watched Suzuki give a demo of the OP-1 a few months ago in Tokyo at SoftA, a Tokyo nightclub and was really excited by the potential of the OP-1. It’s a real workhorse in terms of what it can do sonically and the gigantic number of features that the minus-cule unit features. It is totally worth checking out: www.teenageengineering.com

A I used to occasionally write restaurant and nightclub reviews for CNN, but the editor would (justifiably) always change my reviews. Just to give a sense of atmosphere, here is my review of that club:

Soft

Perhaps you are German. Or perhaps you like Germans. If so, Soft is the place in Tokyo to go. There you will often find Germans listening to minimal techno and very rarely dancing, though occa-sionally shuffling a bit. It feels very un-German, as all the Germans I know like to party their asses off. At other times you will find Swedes there freaking their proverbial shit to Miami Bass or early Detroit Techno. You will also find that the club has a surprisingly good sound system and is painted pure white. They’re really on top of this painting thing- the bathroom always has nary a trace of graffiti. So I always tag it. And sneak beer in in my backpack. You shouldn’t do that. It is Japan after all. Soft excels at serving overpriced drinks and hosting a lot of events thrown by Europeans. These Europeans know other Europeans. Hence the Germans. And the Swedes. And the shuffling.3-1-9-B1 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0002. 0081 (0)3 5467 5817.


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Speculative in nature and taking on a variety of personalities, they share a common touch-stone in engaging the social experience and moreover, in the joy of socialization. There is a decided lack of finish to these collabora-tive projects, but that tends to be true of most Åbäke-centric projects, the gloss of polished graphic design left untended in order for the material core of their projects to attract the focus5. Recent exhibitions and lectures in London, Tokyo, and Toru have brought a wide range of participants from a variety of walks of life interested in taking part in social experimentation.

Suzuki’s forays into the aural world have now entered a new stage, recently employed by Sweden’s Teenage Engineering, a product design/installation/technology collective

headed by ACNE co-founder Jesper Kouthoofd. Hired to help develop the next generation of the OP series, a groundbreak-ing synthesizer/sampler/drum machine with a built-in gravity/motion detector, an onboard FM radio and one of the most sublime user interfaces on the market6, we’ll be seeing widespread application of his exploratory work and a mass-produced interpretation of tactile sound sooner than later. Where Suzuki steers the project form his new posi-tion as director of design is an unknown destination, but it will most definitely be a place of delight.

Yuri Suzuki lives and works in Stockholm and London. www.yurisuzuki.com

Yuri Suzuki.Musical Kettle, 2009.Mixed media.


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UJINO


“The neatness and cleanliness are a very core of Japanese authentic beauty... a wild chaos can only

exist as the subject of exoticism.” –

Ujino Muneteru

considerably large space, the studio a the perfect mix of a father’s well-stocked garage and a pack rat’s junkpile of dust-covered treasures. There was nothing with which dis-tinctly appeared ‘new.’ My eyes encountered furniture, household appliances, various power tools and an intimidating stack of six guitar amplifiers, perhaps the real reason for taking a studio here. Scattered amongst this mess (which Ujino simply refused to deem trash) lay his Rotators instruments, either ready to play, to be reworked or to be decommissioned.

As we get comfortable, I gesture towards the disco ball-spinning Love Arm, one of his first junk-object instruments and perhaps the most eye-catching due to it’s phallic form. Ujino approaches and tells me the piece was inspired by the sounds of a power drill which he happened to notice one day while building a previous installation.

On the way to visit Ujino Muneteru, a suburban void endlessly unfolds. As my express train zips along, neighborhoods are rendered anonymous blurs and any sense of pattern recognition falters. More and more, I loose track of where I am as I’m pulled further out of central Tokyo, yet with every periodic stop, my brain resets as I check the time and make sure I haven’t missed my stop. When I arrived at my destination, Ujino is waiting in an old, rusted, gray 80s mini-wagon which I recognize as familiar, it was used as an instrument in a previous Rotators exhibit I’d attended.

As we head towards his studio, the artist politely enlightens me with what little local knowledge of this “quiet” area he can. From our first exchange, I understood that he had set up shop here because of the near financial impossibility of having a studio in the center of the city. As we entered the


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What soon developed was a fascination with the sound qualities of everyday objects which set off a sonic binge involving listen-ing more acutely to anything and everything. The artist then expanded his repertoire, other household appliances such as blenders and hair dryers were studied and incorpo-rated. Ujino developed a system of control-ling his junkyard orchestra as an aggregate unit by playing and scratching modified vinyl records implanted with particular triggers. The Rotators System, as he calls it, is an analog algorithm which Ujino has crafted, inserting pegs to create his own rhythms over a vinyl record of his choosing. “I’ve al-ways loved beats, especially drum machines. Musically, I’d say I’m influenced by Prince. And dance music too. I love music with any kind of groove, steady beats, so those are the records I use and I like to add some low frequency sounds to it all: drills, blenders and hair dryers put out low tone frequencies that I just, well... enjoy working with.”

While nearly everything Ujino integrates into his instruments is used or beaten up, the artist has not limited himself completely in terms of materials. Deciding what material to use is an essential part of the process. “If I can’t find what I’m looking for I’ll end up buying a newer version of it. I prefer older objects because they just feel more durable. Old objects are generally made better and if I take them apart, I can see how the mechan-ics inside actually work which isn’t the case for most digital products made today.”

Our discussion then veered towards the advent of a perceived micro-imperative in electronic goods, when “nano” was a buzz-word and a driving focus was for manufac-turers to reduce the size of objects, even at the expense of utility. This trend has halted in recent years as touch screen interfaces began dominating the handheld market. Ujino continued, “I remember not being able to hold some things properly at that time‚ there are ergonomic limits, you know, and buttons somehow were getting too small. Older design seemed to pay more attention to the human form. With all the digitaliza-tion, it’s like there was no more weight in an

object and, I don’t want to lose that sensibil-ity for real, durable things.”

For the consumer products modernity manu-factures, Ujino notices a nostalgic utility in them. “In the West, there is a longer sense of connection with manufactured objects; while in Asia‚ for example in China‚ there’s an influx of new Western goods, and an


PACIFIC

Previous spread.Ujino.The Ballad Of Extended Backyard, 2010.Mixed media.Photo by Koo.© 2010 Ujino. All rights reserved.

Above.Ujino.The Rotators - The Savage’s Plastic Ikebana Session, 2007.Mixed media.Photo by Masanori Ikeda.© 2007 Ujino. All rights reserved.

increasing sensibility for them, and I found it hard to find used things, much less anything which I would deem to hold sentimental value. Whenever anything gets old, it’s thrown out and replaced since production is so cheap, especially as plastics are used more than metals there. When my works are exhibited in Asia, the younger viewers tend to look at my work as mechanical pieces, or


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to be fixated on the technical possibilities or limitations of the works; while I’d say that in the West, viewers are more likely to relate and connect with personal or collective his-tories when observing the objects involved.”

“Because you see, it’s a gradual, cumulative process of time before material goods are absorbed by a culture, it’s done by people utilizing them day in and day out. As they become part of the everyday, some kind of relationship forms, more than a mere sense of utility and fetish, and eventually an object takes on a nostalgic aspect as part of a collective, or shared, culture”.

As we continue to pace around his studio, it has become unclear as to what would be OK to pick up, what I should refer to as vintage, and what is just a piece of junk. Ujino quickly asserts that everything in The Rotators is definitively “junk.” All the instruments take their cues and electricity from his Rotator-head unit, a found turntable mounted with a type of switchboard which triggers electric currents to his junk-orchestral arrangement as the intricately peg-implanted vinyl record plays. The pegs form a rhythm and loop until the record is scratched or changed to another record with yet another uniquely peg-encoded “algo-rhythm”. Through the ensuing cacophony and bar-rage of sounds, Ujino’s message is somehow distinctively clear, he uses technology in very much his own way, grounded by a DIY ethos, giving orders rather than taking them and taming a fauna of noisy scrapped objects-cum-instruments. Referencing a familiar example of a computer keyboard, Ujino continues, “It’s made for a particular use but that’s not to say we should keep the blinders on and not find another use for it. With The Rotators, that relationship gets reversed. I’m able to reverse it, and I’m in control of the technology whether I’m scratching the record or building the instruments myself, not the other way around.”

Ujino lives and works in Tokyo.www.the-rotators.com

Ujino.Plywood City, 2008-2010. Mixed media.Courtesy PSM, Berlin.© 2008-2010 Ujino. All rights reserved.


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Pacific Scion Installation LA May 7–28, 2011

Curators PMKFA www.pmkfa.com Antonin Gaultier www.digikiland.com

Artists Atsuhiro Ito www.gotobai.net Kyohei Sakaguchi www.0yenhouse.com Megumi Matsubara www.megumimatsubara.com Motoyuki Daifu www.motoyukidaifu.com PMKFA www.pmkfa.com Takashi Suzuki www.takashisuzuki.com Teppei Kaneuji www.shugoarts.com/en/kaneuji.html Ujino www.the-rotators.com Yotaro Niwa Yuri Suzuki www.yurisuzuki.com

Art Direction PMKFA www.pmkfa.com

Cover drawing PMKFA

Editors Ian Lynam www.ianlynam.com PMKFA Antonin Gaultier

Writers Cameron McKean www.workingtowards.com Ian Lynam www.ianlynam.com Naoki Matsuyama www.twitter.com/nkmtsym Vicente Gutierrez www.vicentegutierrez.com

Thank you Jeri Yoshizu at Scion. Scion Installation crew; Edith, Evan, Kenton & Shane. Fabian Svensson, Haruna Asano Gaultier. Satoko Oe at ShugoArts www.shugoarts.com Baron Osuna at Super Window Project www.superwindowproject.com Yasmin Farry at Centre A www.centrea.org Kazumasa Nonaka at Yamoto Gendai www.yamamotogendai.org Eveline & Nathalie at Musica. Sweatshop Union www.sweatshopunion.com Hiroshi Egaitsu, Andy Ralph, Butchy Fuego, Robbo Ranks.

Thank you for making this happen!


Scion Installation Gallery Presents "Pacific"

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