People's hearts are not open books. When we open them up - if that action does not completely destroy them - there are only further mysteries.
'I don't know why, I just had to.' an exhibition consisting of two installations created using my old university text books (Japanese language), one in a gallery setting, the other in a domestic space, complete with electric fans and unwashed glasses. The pictures presented here start from the third floor, my work room in my residency apartment, going down to the kitchen, and finally to the library on the ground floor of Tenjinyama art studio.
For me, this work is a meditation on the the creative/destructive process while also being a demonstration of sorts of the sheer amount of knowledge each of us is expected to memorise. What role do these memories (information/education) play in constructing our identity and shaping our future?
What does it all mean?
For most of my so-called "art career" I have been interested in finding things in my everyday surrounding and transforming them into art. I used to call it "contradictions," when the banal upon further inspection is actually and entry point into another reality, something strange and magical - now I prefer to just call them mysteries. Transforming everyday objects, in this case books, into art is like that. I think what I like about this work is the material, the pages, the paper. The paper fortune teller become like diamonds, mountains, towers depending on their size. A lot of Japanese Origami is quite flat but these things (Goggar in Icelandic, they have them all over the world) are fully three dimensional, you look at it and it has this architectural, even landscape, quality. That's what I like about them. It becomes all about the volume of material, how a single book could have so much of it - and in this project it was five books. People are really surprised when they encounter it, like, wow, and just imagine all the books we force kids to study in school; Unbelievable.
Speaking of school, back in my art school days when I first did something like this, my thinking was still very un-evolved. I looked at my practice as something purely good, politically correct even. I mean, destroying text books by turning them into children's play things - fortune tellers at that! -it's so magical! It's recycling! I thought something like that. I still do to a certain degree, this has immense, obvious appeal to me visually, materially. However, without stating the obvious too much, about knowledge and the 'get-an-education-for-career-reasons' in the neoliberal university system, and school in general, which I hated, what I didn't draw attention to back in my school days was the destructive element of the process. I would say I was making art out of trash, but now I'm not so sure... Art such as this is equally about destruction I think. It's chaotic and not just in a quirky way. The process is violent and disrespectful.The literal throwing away other people's creations, any potential that I (or others) keep learning using these books. Potential futures ( in a way being an artists is throwing away my future haha (not even Artist as a job, what a waste!))
This was my thought process. For every part of me that knows that this [art] is a worth while thing, that I made something important to me that its visually interesting and fun, all my work is also a slaughter. Destruction.
It's a complex thing and I'm not sure I can properly explain it. So I repeat: People's hearts are not open books - nothing really is.
Thanks to the staff at Tenjinyama Art Studio for the support and to Reneé (@vomitodeartista on Instagram.) for documenting the work.