Recent Openings: Kodama & Nanzuka Underground
Tatjana Doll photographed with
SPEED_Shinkansen Bullet Train 2011
enamel, acrylic,
2m x 30m (10 pieces), 2008
Image courtesy of Nanzuka Underground
The new exhibitions in Kodama Gallery and Nanzuka Underground Gallery (both in the Shirokane Art Complex) serendipitously, address speed and movement, but do so in different ways.
Kodama presents a collection of video/sonic work by a Kyoto-based artist Akira Miyanaga. The main gallery contains an installation in which the two larger walls combine projections from six smaller wall segments. The video appears to be shot from a left-side window of a moving car, and the projection on the large walls in oriented clockwise. This naturally aligned direction is contradicted by the counter-clockwise movement on the smaller walls, so that the overall effect is at once enveloping and disorienting. The viewer can sense the speed, but the reverse movement on the smaller walls suppresses the sensation of movement and the viewer is suspended in the midst of streetlights and neon that illuminate city night. The purposefully exposed projector cords continue the theme of road construction, part of the cityscape in the video.
Akira Miyanaga, “about the lights of land”, 2010, 8 channel video projection, 5 minutes loop
One floor above, in the Nanzuka Underground Gallery, the German artist Tatjana Doll is making her Tokyo debut. This show consists of several enamel on canvas paintings and two videos. Doll’s two-dimensional works convey the sensation of speed through the combination of large scale and angularity. The cars she paints seem to come alive—the doors of the Lamborgini stretching up and out like giant bat wings. The only painting in the show containing a human figure Rip Stealing Beauty (2009), reflects the movement and the angularity of the car representations that surround it. Doll’s nod to Japan’s contribution to the discourse of speed is the representation of Shinkansen bullet train shown in the gallery as a video.
