The Perception of Scenery Created by Shinji Ohmaki
The universe keeps on expanding
That is why we all feel anxious (1)
When maximums and minimums are barely in balance, there lies something within. We strongly feel that something is trying to be manifested from the space between light and darkness. These works are a journey to the very limit of the world that we can perceive, and stimulate our thoughts on the utmost limits of our perception.
In the Aichi Triennale 2016, Shinji Ohmaki simultaneously realized three massive installations. While we were surprised, I believe his works had the shared characteristic of being “environmental sculptures.” When we experience those environments, scenery is born. This is of course in the sense of creating a scenery painting, and not an actual scene. I believe it is simply a matter of the environment “affording a scene” through our senses.
As an art director for the Aichi Triennale, I had the rare opportunity to closely watch the process of art works being born at the venue. Here I would like to share my thoughts on that process.
Affording a Scene
The concept of affordance is useful to understand the manner in which the environment acts upon our senses. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, James J. Gibson turns the general conception of ecological psychology that organisms perceive the environment and carry out actions as the primary actors on its head, and proposes that the environment makes “affordances” to organisms, allowing them to undertake certain actions.
When we are walking, for example, we will attempt to place our feet on a flat place even if we are not conscious of the act. From an ecological psychology perspective, the terrain is affording us flat places to place our feet. If we deviate from this sort of everyday environment, what kind of perceptions can we obtain? When viewing Ohmaki’s works, I felt the affordance created by a space that deviates from our everyday experiences.
In the Aichi Triennale 2016, Ohmaki exhibited three works based on the theme of light and darkness. Among his works, Echoes Infinity – Infinity and a Moment became a major topic at the Aichi Arts Center, which served as the primary venue of the event. Echoes Infinity was the latest piece in a series that Ohmaki has produced since 2002, and it was the largest-scale piece thus far in the series.
A three-dimensional body filled with white light. It is a space of such bright whiteness that you momentarily lose your perception of up and down. In the center of a white room that is 20 meters to a side, stands a white pillar. On the floor of approximately 400 square meters, 1,600 white felt pieces are arranged concentrically around the central pillar, creating patterns such as flowers and birds that invoke the varied cultural spheres of Eurasia.
Creating patterns with over 100 colors of sand imbued with natural mineral pigments, natural materials of Japan, atop the felt using stencils was a painstaking production process. The sand ground from rocks was not adhered in any way to the felt, and so it moves with the slightest breeze, which creates a mysterious wandering sensation. The enormous amount of time required to produce the piece and the long cultural history of Eurasia are both expressed through this mandala, making the work a multilayered expression of time, and the Eternity and a Moment found in the title also hides the “disappeared” time of Ohmaki himself.
A portion of the patterns are related to Ohmaki’s memories from his childhood. They are the familiar patterns and designs Ohmaki remembers from the kimonos sold at the clothing shop run by his family in his childhood. His childhood home and the surrounding area, however, have now disappeared through urban development, and no longer exist. How to perceive this total loss of the scene of one’s childhood home is not a subject only for Ohmaki, but for many Japanese people today. While these places may no longer exist as materials, they still remain as memories. Echoes-Infinity could be considered a device to repeatedly experience this phenomenon of loss.
The mandala created with enormous time crumbles slowly as people enter the space, and at some point will disappear. This invokes an association with the mandalas of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism. On this subject, Ohmaki shares the following thoughts.
“The space becomes more and more permeated, creating a variety of connections, and changes the density of memories. It’s not just a fresh, beautiful flower, but links with the long-sleeping, deep memories within you that vaguely rise to the surface.”(2)
While you cannot understand the sense of the space becoming permeated without setting foot in the picture, the multi-colored sands mix together as the planned patterns crumble, and the overall piece becomes permeated with countless traces. Because the design is stored within miniscule sand and mixed together, you walk as if you are stepping on thin ice when you enter the piece. You truly experience the sensation of the environment affording you a sensation. The scene changes as you walk, and the changing scene changes how you walk.
A Journey to the Edge of the Night
If Echoes-Infinity offers a sensation of floating through white light, Ohmaki’s work Liminal Air creates the feeling of being cast out into darkness. If you sit down in the unsteady darkness, you can hear a faint wind blowing from somewhere. If you close your eyes for a short time, you can see the darkness slowly shifting. Shifting darkness is an unusual expression; a faint dynamic is created in the invisible space, which invokes a tactile sensation. As the word “Liminal” suggests, this work challenges the limits of our senses, and allows us to experience what occurs at that limit. Through the work, our perception of space, and the perception of something occurring within our own bodies melds together.
Within the darkness, a black cloth is moving. The sound is the wind used to move the cloth. We at the festival were able to see the installation together with the artist from its very first stage, and were able to witness the minute process of adjusting the work. It is necessary to adjust the light to ensure it is at the very limit of visibility and pitch darkness, as well as the movement of the giant curtain. In other words, it is necessary to control the amorphous form of light, as well as the physical form of the curtain moving in the wind, and success only occurs when a particular balance is achieved.
The most important element, however, is time. While it differs by person, most only first feel the presence of darkness after waiting for five minutes. Once you perceive the darkness, however, it seems to grow closer and closer, with the feeling that you can catch it.
After experiencing the two aforementioned works, you can honestly understand the latest work of the Triennale, Gravity and Grace, which is created as a place where light and darkness are interchanged with one another. Installed in the atrium of the Toyohashi Arts Theatre PLAT located next to Toyohashi Station, it is a much-talked about piece that created a mysterious spectacle in the town.
With a height of 7 meters and a diameter of 4 meters, the piece makes the building feel small, and the delicate patterns of plants and animals, also seen in Echoes Infinity creates an intimate atmosphere around the work. In the words of the artist, the piece is made not only in the motif lifeforms such as birds and plants on an iron jar, but is also imbued with images that invoke human history and societal problems. This makes the piece an overall “miniature of the world.”
While during the day the pearl-white surface appears to be made from porcelain, at night it projects a cold light which illuminates the town. A special lighting device is installed in the center of the piece, and its vertical movement creates a shadow play with the motifs cut into the outer surface. The lighting fixture is made from 12 LED facets which project the light in all directions. The lights grow and fade in intensity, and cannot be viewed directly at their brightest setting. At this moment, the inside of the jar is a white brilliance, while the outer surface is shadow. In other words, the inner and outer surface of the jar are interchanged, creating the mysterious feeling of seeing a three-dimensional body flipped inside out.
A Jar that is an Inversion of the Universe
While 20,000 lumens is sufficiently brilliant, as a special event during the Triennale, the jar projected the brightest light in the world, 70,000 lumens. If you ask why Ohmaki chose to call this LED the “man-made Sun”, compare that to the 35,000 lumens used for stadium lighting at a baseball night game, but the reason goes beyond simple brilliance. The unbelievable light was meant to recall the memory of the Big Bang of the universe, thus invoking the sensation of being present for the birth of a new universe within the jar. While it goes without saying that Gravity and Grace is the title of the eminent Simone Weil’s seminary work, I also had the feeling that the title also expressed the ideas of cosmic theory.
While anyone looking at the piece would say it is a jar, after viewing the piece repeatedly during the Triennale, I came to feel it was a form flowing in the direction of gravity. I saw it as having the form of a single drop of water being frozen in the first instant of its fall. In that one miniscule drop, living creatures, humans, and our society are all contained as shadows. While they have no substance at the moment, these “shadows” may soon become real. Ohmaki perceived the venue as a theater, and spoke of his vision of realizing “a kind of drama that surpasses the time of civilization.”
That may very well be the Toyohashi Arts Theatre PLAT, where that drama is played out in a shadow play at the cosmic range, and the shadows sleeping within a single drop are projected out into the universe.
It is clear that this dazzling light is not the “light of enlightenment” or the “light of civilization.” It is the torch of art itself, which proceeds outwards into the world while accepting that it cannot know the moment it will be extinguished. Does this jar contain the entrance to the secret of what “affords” humans their current solitude in a chain that has continued since the very birth of substance itself? Or perhaps it is a door that opens inwards into ourselves?
(1) “Two Billion Light Years of Loneliness”, Shuntaro Tanikawa (Translated by William I. Elliott and Kazao Kawamura)
(2) Shinji Ohmaki’s statements based on information published on the Aichi Triennale website
