I am using a keyboard to write this monograph like it is a perfectly normal thing. On the screen, characters appear one after another in almost equal size, in a font selected from those installed on the computer. Until just recently, however, we were writing essays by hand. How will that memory remain in the future?
Will the feeling of the friction between pen and paper, and the experience of writing characters with varying sizes in lines that fade and darken become just a memory of childhood?
Printed characters with uniform shapes are easy to read, and were absorbed into society in an instant. Going forward, we could of course develop this conversation around the properties of these characters to be stored in other media as data, and their mutability brought about by editing methods such as copy & paste, which are used to refine essays, but here we will avoid those topics.
Instead, I will focus only on the role our body will play in the disparity between characters written by hand as a physical substance, and those which exist through the contrast between light and dark. We have almost forgotten that the movements of our hands and the shapes of our letters are interconnected. What will this mean 100 years from today?
What will likely be most prominent is the influence we will see in the rhythm of our words. While we are certainly following a rhythm when we ruminate over and read characters written through a keyboard, the spacing and size of characters written by hand imparts them with a natural intonation. That is almost entirely lost the moment characters are entered through a keyboard.
Why am I beginning a monograph on Shinji Ohmaki 's work with such a topic? If you trace the surface of Flotage –tectonicswith your eyes, the movement of its countless fibrous lines will stimulate thoughts of the historical transitions of characters within you. Until now, we have occasionally seen these lines imbued with enchanting movement possessed with physicality in Ohmaki’s works. Liminal Air- decend- features the gently rounded curves of a miniature garden landscape, but gently sways the moment people enter within. In Echos –Infinity, the beautiful flower pattern laid out upon the floor slips as people walk over it, revealing lines in the traces of their footsteps. In particular, we can tirelessly watch the unpredictable dancing of the thin, floating membrane of Liminal Air Space-Time as if a living creature was before our very eyes.
As I already mentioned, we in the 21st century are losing the rhythm born from the connection of physical experiences, such as feeling the friction between materials, with thoughts in our methods of transcribing characters. I do not wish to nostalgically call for the resurrection of handwriting. Instead, I would like to question how the sense of truths and falsehoods mixing, which could be considered a major defining characteristic of Ohmaki’s works, is related to the experience of writing by hand.
The world of art, in particular sculpture, is the creation of experiences that allow you to perceive real objects. Especially in recent years, this has developed towards creating a sense of volume, mass and weight. However, the transition to incorporate sculpture with images and sound, instead of treating it as a stand-alone field, occurred at almost the same time characters came to be entered by keyboard. These new techniques reintegrated forms that previously targeted different perceptions. This of course represents the reformation the development of digital technology brought to art, which was connected to our modern way of thinking and methods that categorized and separated all things, including vision and sound.
Recognizing sculpture as a mass is nothing more than focusing on a single perception. In reality, we are influenced by a wide range of factors, such as the texture of the sculpture’s surface, the play of light on its surface, the size of the space in which it is placed, and its materials. The pinnacle sought by modern sculpture, however, was supposed to have been eliminating these distracting perceptions and governing the viewer’s perception while viewing a single completed work. These once discarded continuous experiences of straddling many perceptions, such as space and light, are now once more open to the artist due to these modern technologies.
Light, color and space can be considered the elements Ohmaki uses most often to create the effect of feeling continuous experiences. We cannot touch any of these elements, and they bring a feeling of etherealness to Ohmaki’s works. Within truths and falsehoods, it is this non-physical lightness that relates to falsehood. While these elements are amorphous and cannot be touched, and should therefore be difficult to form, it appears to us that Ohmaki is shaping them freely. Ohmaki is continuously incorporating this movement, change, and the creation of a different viewing experience for each person skillfully into his works. You cannot always view his works in the same way. This ethereal, amorphous, and unstable characteristic is incorporated into the viewing experience. I would like you to recall that when I discussed the reintegration of perceptions through digital technology, rather than the comprehensive connection of vision to the other bodily senses, I focused more on the creation of a continuous experience within the viewer.
In other words, while it is possible that digital technology could be used to focus on a single perception, I feel that is the connection of these dispersed perceptions to the diverse bodies and memories of the viewers, which thereby changes the viewing of the work, to be the most prominent aspect of Ohmaki’s works. In reality, digital technology simplifies the management of unified information transfer, and a conflict therefore occurred in leveraging it for democratic expressions that seek diversity.
In the 1990s, the experience of writing by hand was being rapidly lost, and our daily lives were being flooded with amorphous information such as images and sound, but at the same time, this new viewing experience, which connected our diverse rhythms and dispersed perceptions, was also created. In other words, Ohmaki’s works, which are defined by free looking and movement and the following of changes in movement and textures, rather than a management-based mode that requires high tension and focus, could be considered very close to our daily physical perceptions. Therefore it is now possible to connect our individual, trivial memories with a work of art before our eyes. In that moment, instead of simply gazing at a massive flow of information, we are experiencing the awakening of our own senses through our retinas, eardrums, and skin.
Above is what I have observed Shinji Ohmaki, the iconic artist of 21st century, and discussed the relationship of his contemporary nature to the information media society. We can say that the physicality of writing characters, in other words drawing lines, has continuously held a vital position in the way we interact with the world from ancient times until today. We have lived by perceiving the existence of things beyond what we can see in our relationship with nature, such as acquiring food and securing a place to live. It is the manifestation in our physical senses of our understanding that we hold a limited existence compared to the vast unpredictability of nature.
What is possible and impossible with our hands? Cultivating grain, acquiring animals and plants, laying stones, cutting down trees - each of these acts of creation represents the compression of extremely complex and multilayered intelligence. When humans carved into earthen walls and wood bark using stones and other tools, knowledge was being expressed within their very hands. Like nature, humans themselves have continued to change in an unpredictable manner, and to know and understand the outside world, they have been highly conscious of their body as a border.
Ohmaki’s works do not only powerfully exceed the paradigm of modern sculpture; they awaken our long-preserved sense of the relationship between our bodies and the outside world. Unpredictable movement is bound together and released. These lines are not simply decoration, but are perceived as the movement that connects us to our bodily senses. To us humans, who can now freely manipulate images and the contrast of light and dark on screens, this is a perception that must be resurrected now more than ever, and is the very foundation of the appeal of Ohmaki’s works.
