“If ‘being’ there is what it means to exist, then we will remain confused by this world in which everything disappears in the blink of an eye.” For Shinji Ohmaki, the doubt of existence is inflicted by a traumatic event that alters both the person and the planet. The assurance of having found a place in the world and standing on a territory in the fullness of talent and consciousness may have blindsided the human agent, rendering this privileged agency oblivious or even indifferent to the imminent catastrophe engulfing the entire ecology, a catastrophe partly authored by this all too confident intelligence.
For Ohmaki, being in the world offers some kind of a false security; it also tends to cultivate the conceit of human mastery over nature. This is the basis of the “rustle” that evokes the precarious condition of existence in Ohmaki’s troubled but also inspired mind. Where before existence may have been intuited as a constant and a given, some kind of a birthright or an ostinato that is the sign of the normal, in the face of exceptional decimation like the one caused by the great earthquake and the ensuing nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, existence proves to be so delicate and flimsy. In light of such disproportion between human hubris and the specter, and spectacle, of loss, Ohmaki asks: “Where is the boundary between what is substantial and spiritual, and the self and others? How is one supposed to go about recognizing and pursuing such boundaries? Who am I? What does it mean to be human?" Between substance and spirit is the voice, or the sound, that asks about the human.
The idea of the “boundary” is fundamental in the aesthetic of Ohmaki’s art. It is in the boundary where he locates the energy of the tension that perturbs his well-being. It is uncanny that the French philosopher Roland Barthes also turns to the word “rustle” to describe the work of language both as a convention and a situation, instilled and yet always translated in the acts and gestures of speaking with others; this is the nature itself of modernity. Barthes remarks in the beautiful essay “The Rustle of Language” written in 1975 that “the rustle is the noise of what is working well. From which follows this paradox: the rustle denotes a limit-noise, an impossible noise, the noise of what, functioning to perfection, has no noise; to rustle is to make audible the very evaporation of noise: the tenuous, the blurred, the tremulous are received as the signs of an auditory annulation.” If Ohmaki contemplates the state of the “boundary,” Barthes configures the abstraction of structure, the drone of an encompassing context that is also, in the same breath, the particularity of its utterance. The rustle is evidence of existence, “proof of life,” as it were, but it similarly lays bare and brings to attention the mode in which it is made to work in a particular way as if by nature’s design. This may remind us of the convivial starlings in flight, a phenomenon called murmuration in which they forage or migrate en masse as if spurred by the madness of birds, folding in and out of the sky, swirling or flocking like bacteria or fish or a crowd. A part of the word is wonderfully and viscerally sonic. A murmur is a whisper, an undertone that speaks of human assemblies and computer technology.
This swarm of an ecology is currently in peril. And Ohmaki acknowledges this with awareness and humility: “Due to the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we human beings are on the diverging paths to reexamine our relations with others from the aspects of life, thought, nation and society, such as the unsolved energy problems and the pervasive effects of racism from the United States to the world... My search for the invisible existence is to grasp a beam of light in the dark.” Invisibility, therefore, is not absence in Ohmaki’s schema; it is a liminality from which to grasp a chance to reconsider the world and hopefully to arrest its drift towards irreversible perdition.
From this philosophical armature, we glean the enigmatic work of Ohmaki. In this exhibition, we see various instances of the rustle, the condition of the possibility, and the possibility itself playing out within the condition. There is a high level of control and acuity in these scenes even as there is contingency to be sharply perceived as well. In one quiet but compelling work, an impression of a floral motif is intricately and painstakingly spread on acrylic board through the idiosyncratic pigment of minerals [1]mixed with correction fluid, which in its basic use is meant to disappear and recede into paper as it masks a mistake. This hybrid medium lavished on thermoplastic is discursively and materially intriguing, referencing “error” and the restitution of what is right through a particular substance that is white, opaque, applied with a brush like painting and made to dry in the manner of a primer; it also generates a semblance of a palimpsest, or layers of what is wrong and what is correct, some kind of pentimenti that mimics a brocade or embroidery, white embossed on white. Then there is what the artist calls flotage, a portmanteau presumably cobbled together from frottage and floating, a mixture of the vigor of rubbing and the feeling of buoyancy, of friction and lightness; here, the correction fluid is placed on alluringly placid glass. And finally, there is the exemplary suspended fabric, defying gravity and never touching the ground; inviting comparisons with sorcery and miracle; tempting the viewer with the algorithm of folds, the generosity and flair of ornament versus the volition of figure or representation, the absorption of air and light; and confusing the senses altogether. The drapery does not resist the elements in the ambience, but it does not solely rely on the atmosphere to keep it afloat. The rustle is generated by the ghostly machine and the chance offered by the world, a mélange of metaphysics, technology, and phenomenology.
The reflection of Ohmaki on the precarity of this world leads him to weave another mesh of questions pertaining to identity. Certainly, these are broader inquiries that concretize in the predicaments of the self as it seeks to belong to a collective like family or culture or ideology. In this regard, he strikes a conversation with the writer Yutaka Haniya, who was born and raised in Taiwan when the country was ruled by Japan. Ohmaki relates that Haniya “felt uncomfortable with the harsh attitude that the Japanese held towards the Taiwanese people, and stated that he had lost faith both in Japan and in his own existence.” The juxtaposition of country and being is significant, because it reveals Ohmaki’s interest in the social environment as it mediates and is mediated by the self. Haniya pursued this problem of identity within the milieu of colonialism: “As he continued to question himself and his existence, he eventually arrived at the philosophy of ‘the discomfort of self-identity.’” Like existence, identity is an experiment, subjected to the vicissitudes of a repertoire of forces.
Ohmaki, if we revisit his words quoted in the beginning, is drawn to this frisson, this stir or fuss, the thrill elicited by an impossibility that rests on a boundary or a limit. He avails of the phrase “blink of an eye” to dramatize that moment when the investment of the self in the world vanishes unerringly and overwhelmingly. In this flash of intense annihilation and a sudden disappearance, or in the words of Barthes, of “annulation,” how do human beings live with the fragments or remains of their constitution, amid the ruin of civilizations, and the fantasies of what has become an obsessive identity? This blink, this restive double vision or quirky optical reflex, catches the elusive limit or boundary. This is the crystallization of a rustle, an apparition of sound, the whir of normalcy, but also the omen of a vast cataclysm, the murmur of a future.
