LoosenArt Mag / Gallery

Ryoichi Kurokawa and the Natural Unity of Time

Posted on January 10 2019


 

Author Giovanna Gammarota
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
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In the most accredited theory on the birth of the Universe it has been defined that its expansion began immediately after the Big Bang with the consequent birth of space-time. In fact, modern physics considers the Planck era that arises between the zero and the explosion moment, when the four fundamental forces - electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity - had the same intensity and were unified in one strength, like the natural unity of time. Originally, therefore, the four forces constituted a Single. The universe had a certain size, it was a concentrate of energy that would later generate flows.
In the culture of the Far East we have long been witnessing a process of reflection and decryption of immaterial flows, such as virtual realities that have come over our daily life, compared or better attributed to the natural sense of things, a primordial sense. This happens, for example, in the musical field with the contamination between electronic and natural sounds that give life to a new sound, experiencing the possibility of interaction between what is the physical reality of the world and its virtual reality.
The greatest exponent of this musical vision is undoubtedly the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who brought to the attention of a wider audience a music that for the first time naturally amalgamates different sounds extracted both from the real world and from the objects built by man joining the electronic sound, a mix that Sakamoto has developed over time and in which he has approached more and more the collision between the sounds until reaching a new harmony.

These experiments have gone hand in hand with increasingly incisive reflections on what time, emptiness and space mean in the photographic image in relation to the individual and its existence in the world, thanks to authors who have staged the "time" as a memory between past and future "such as the Koreans Jungjin Lee and Koo Bohnchang, who apparently only treat the" landscape "or the" still life "while, through the rarefaction of the resumed subject, they reach the essence of seeing.
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, unfold.alt, (2016). Audiovisual Installation, Courtesy University of Salford Art Collection
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Ryoichi Kurokawa (Osaka, 1978) ranks among the natural and the virtual image of which it is possible to visit the exhibition al-jabr (algebra) underway in Modena at the Galleria Civica. In the 1990s, Kurokawa began producing audiovisual installations in which he combined sound and image, pioneering experiments in the contamination of the senses in perception (synaesthesia). His artistic career was born with music, he went through multimedia installations to get today to produce sculptures and prints using highly technological creative systems. His method, while benefiting from high-profile scientific collaborations such as that of astrophysicist Vincent Minier (Paris-Saclay University and University of Nantes), refers to a factual conception of tradition comparable to that of kintsugi, or the Japanese art that uses 'gold to weld ceramic objects that have suffered damage, highlighting its fragility and underlining, at the same time, the strength regained thanks to the recomposition of the parts.
The complex of the exhibited works is the demonstration of how man can interact and even manage the virtual element bringing it on a plane that brings the spectator closer to the fascination of the scientific elements without being swallowed up or removed. However, these two feelings appear here "acceptable" by virtue of the fact that they discover the real meaning, namely: the game that is established between the user and work paradoxically is just to fall inside it to return to emerge and observe it from the exterior with a new awareness given by experience.
We are faced with a look that is cleansed of contamination, the observer must here take an attitude that goes beyond the simple fascination of images and strive to enter a dimension that, however virtual it may be, becomes an exercise in visual understanding.
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, lttrans #6, Installation Photo, Objectum, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2018
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Therefore, in Kurokawa there isn't only the display of a visual generated by a series of calculations but the representation of what the author defines "time-based sculptures",  an art based on the passage of time in relation to image and sound.
It is no coincidence that the author compares the observation of nature to a scientific analysis so as to collaborate regularly with realities such as the International Iberian Laboratory of Nanotechnology with which he realized ad / ab Atom (2017). Seven screens make up the work, at the end of the established time the images start to flow from one screen to another without interruption. Time is a repeatable segment, sometimes it stops for a few moments, the image disappears - or are we not to perceive it anymore? - The flow here travels in two directions: back and forth simultaneously, each screen radiates different images or is it the same image that changes from one screen to another? What we see is the scientific reality of matter observed through quantum mechanics, the operation carried out by the author puts ancient algebraic elaborations into contact, when they functioned by observing nature, with a contemporary interpretation of the same calculation that, through the modern technology, is able to show us the invisible, its moving underhand, its growth and transformation exactly as it still happens today in the Universe in which we live.
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, lttrans #7, Installation Photo, Objectum, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2018
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Already in unfold (2016), the first audiovisual installation that you meet in the exhibition, the flow of energy fills the forms until they disappear. Its concentration is perceived, its continuous transformation is like a network that connects and crosses everything, destroys and restructures the form. But the memory of what was, like an eye that is about to close forever (metaphor of death) retraces the form itself (metaphor of life). The artist makes explicit the process of birth and death through the representation of the perpetuation of matter that is reborn every time a collision occurs between stellar systems, in a continuum that we can define eternal: we create an origin to end with a memory and start again.
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Also in elementum (2018) the theme of rebirth through death represents the heart of the work. Used in some disciplines to alleviate the sense of negative oppression, the Oshiban technique - the art of pressing natural elements such as flowers - to which this series refers, consists of three properties that make explicit the transience of things. A path in which the abandonment of the mind (mushin, literally "without mind") frees us from the obstinacy in seeking perfection through passing annicca ("impermanence") that leads to perceive the acceptance of the end of existence - and therefore death - until we reach mono no aware, a feeling that allows us to obtain greater awareness in front of the reality that everything ends up being reborn and therefore to the discovery that in the end there is beauty.

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Ryoichi Kurokawa, unfold.alt, (2016). Audiovisual Installation, Courtesy University of Salford Art Collection
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Oscillanting Continuum (2013) again shows a traversability of the matter that constitutes the Universe. Of this propulsive-magnetic force that permeates everything, including the individual, the author provides us with a graphic representation that is based on scientific findings. A horizontal red line connects two juxtaposed videos making it literally skip the oscillations detected from one screen to another as if they were not separated. However they are transformed because the equilibrium that passes through them is impalpable, they pass from one screen to another changing position and color, placing themselves above or below the central red line as if the latter represented a virtual equator and the oscillations they trespassed it from top to bottom and vice versa while showing a contamination that appears as a metaphor of interchangeable equality. An energy matrix that travels around us, in the two hemispheres of existence, comes out and re-enters, thickens like a swarm of insects, creating a nucleus, draws shapes that are at first clear and simple, becoming more and more complex until we reach here all 'explosion - the primordial chaos of the Big Bang in its infinite replica - from which a new scheme is reborn.
There is in Kurokawa's work a precipitate of matter in which time can be observed indistinctly from right to left and from top to bottom: what appears different in reality is the same because matter represents the whole, there is no other way to observe it and this can be inferred only by observing it scientifically.  It seems Ryoichi Kurokawa is suggesting us, that after all science is nothing but nature in a different form.
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, Oscillating Continuum, 2013. Audiovisual Sculpture, Courtesy Fondation Boghossian
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, Oscillating Continuum, 2013. Audiovisual Sculpture, Courtesy Fondation Boghossian
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Ryoichi Kurokawa, 2017, Audiovisual installation, Duration: 08'00" loop, Edition: 6 + 2 AP
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http://www.ryoichikurokawa.com
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