Be it painting, video art, or crafts, Ota Fine Arts has been promoting talented artists who work across different media since its founding in 1994. From its beginning, the Japanese gallery, which started in the Ebisu area in Tokyo, has represented internationally acclaimed Yayoi Kusama, renowned for her recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton. It has also been representing other Japanese artists such as Hiraki Sawa and Tomoko Kashiki. Over the last few years, it has brought more regional character into its programmes, featuring Indonesian Ay Tjoe Christine, Korean Yee Sookyung, Iranian Monir Farmanfarmaian, as well as other artists from China, Mongolia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.
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Takao Minami Difference Between 2014 HD video, dual-channel, 16:9, vertical position, stereo sound; 6 min. loop. Image courtesy of the artist and Ota Fine Arts.
Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Takao Minami, his debut in Singapore. The exhibition will feature the artist’s new work, including both double and single-channel video installations, as well as a sculptural installation incorporating the light of a flame and shadow.
From site-specific installation to video, Minami’s work always explores the fundamental elements involved in audio-visual technologies, namely light, colour and sound. This self-reflexivity about the mechanics of video production is rendered with tight attention to composition, the tensions between abstraction and figuration, and the manifold qualities of light itself.
Projected light is conceived as something so basic – even primitive – as the raw light of a flame thrown onto a wall by a magnifying glass. In “Fire Symbol”, the words for ‘Fire’ in ancient writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the Dongba pictograms of the Nakhi people in southern China, are engraved onto the surface of the glass. Although the wick of the candle produces a deceptively simple projective installation, through it Minami illustrates the dual nature of light in our media-saturated world: light as symbol and light as phenomena.
And phenomena is abstracted, and refracted in ever-varying ways, both by the flickering light of the flame and the flashes of core video light in “Kishi no eizo”, “Quiet Hole” and “Difference Between”. For Minami, colour is derived from the ‘8-Bit Era’ of retro video games, and these early television and video colour bars inform his choice of palette. His single-channel works “Kishi no eizo” and “Quiet Hole” are assemblages of neon light, reducing spliced landscapes, stencilled silhouettes of foliage, miniature humans, and other indiscernible shapes to vivid, essential hues. “Difference Between” is even further pared down to a highly saturated dichromatic schema so that the moving image is balanced between parallel elements – blue water and a bright white sky.
These digital collages, arranged through a “process… closer to composition in painting than film editing”1, can also be viewed as inheriting their longitudinal format from traditional Japanese and Chinese hanging scroll paintings of mountainous landscapes and waterfalls. In fact, the slow, seamless downward pan encourages a more contemplative eye than the speed associated with most new media. It almost reminds one to dwell upon the immaterial, abstract space between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. But whatever this nether, virtual space truly is within our contemporary digital reality – between the bars of a television monitor or the pixels of a high-definition video projection – still remains a question unanswered.
Nevertheless, Takao Minami’s work is ultimately grounded in the real. His footage is extracted and edited from videologues of his recent journeys between Bangkok and Singapore. Further, while on the road, Minami’s heightened attentiveness brings his audience through the everyday soundscapes of Southeast Asia.
This season, we invite viewers to discover the unique and sensitive video compositions, projections and reflections Takao Minami has created for his solo presentation at Ota Fine Arts Singapore.
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