Asako Shiroki Replaying the World
Asako Shiroki Replaying the World
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between 0 and 2 2013 Oak, Cherry, colored cotton ribbon 230 Ă— 210 Ă— 245 cm
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in the grid 01 2012 Cherry 52 × 105 × 80 cm
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Previous page: pile and pile 2011 Cherry 78 × 180 × 132 cm
Statements from Galleries 2011: Replaying the World – The understanding of Life Galery 21yo-j, Tokyo, Japan
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putting a lattice on the floor 2011 Oak 6 Ă— 167 Ă— 122 cm
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a water vein 2009 Cherry, Oak 234 × 23 × 38 cm
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yellow collar 2009 Cherry 7 × 15 × 15 cm
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#2
in the grid 02
2011
2012
Oak
Ash
23 × 74 × 3 cm
44 × 44 × 25 cm
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Techniques Re-Arranged: On the Sculptures of Asako Shiroki As for the abstraction that is consistent throughout all the sculptures by Asako Shiroki, we can point out this factor quite concretely, though it may sound somewhat paradoxical. In short, it is the fact that forms of furniture and utensils used in our everyday lives, such as chairs, bowls, and grids, appear in the work, but they remain only as partial elements. Their signification and functions, which are essential things associated with any tool, are kept indefinitely suspended by the imperfect, failed execution of integration in the name of wholeness. Her work, where anonymity of tools is implicit, wanders between craft whose essential purpose is “the beauty of use” and sculpture where realization of autonomous forms is intended. Although you may interpret this halfway attitude as negative, her abstraction needs to be understood in the following way: Through the anonymity of the tools deprived of their names, Shiroki’s work succeeds in cutting open the world. If so, what does “her work cutting open the world” really mean? The form of her work has proximity to those of tools, proximity of the kind for which equivalent amounts of skepticism and affinity are needed, behind which there is a story of how she has experienced several turning-points to achieve this, the clues of which are ubiquitous in the artist’s texts. Initially, when she had only a visual and superficial understanding of the internal structure and components of tools, her direct observation of the furniture production process made her more physically aware of what they really were. Secondly, at some point she noticed that the way people use tools is continually renewed and determined in everyday life, and is described by the artist as “anonymous techniques.” These two perceptions are complementary to each other, corresponding to the relationship between making and installing. Furthermore, the linkage between versatility of how tools create forms and that of how they are used must have critical implications in the work that Shiroki creates. The work pile and pile features repetition of bowllike forms, which were made by imitating a proper production process of bowls, including the use of cherry trees. Here, through the repeated action of accumulation, it can be said that making forms and using forms are doubly realized, and their inseparably close relationship is newly built within the work. Referring to matter and form, the contrary pair of concepts, M. Heidegger placed tools at the halfway point between objects and artworks. As is well known, Heidegger saw the grounds of Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand being, such as tools) in their “serviceability” and “reliability.” In Shiroki’s work, forms of tools are used in such a fragmentary manner that they may even seem used only as 21
a metaphor. However, taking a route via Heidegger’s refined analysis illuminates a certain aspect of her work. That is, autonomy of the forms of those dysfunctional tools. For example, a chair-like structure is installed on the wall at a point much higher than that of the human body, denying the act of “sitting” by displaying its back to us. (Or in a similar example, another chair is installed with an object positioned on its seat to interrupt the act of “sitting”). When it comes to objects that remind us of bowls, they lack the function of “containment” by, to begin with, having no hollow carved into them, or by being placed upside down on the floor. Those new forms created through dislocation of their functions, as the artist claims, make the emergence of a site of zero-experience possible, by wearing away the individual’s memory and losing the association with their usual meaning. Primarily, repetition of forms, counted as a representative feature of her work, is aimed at functioning also as an “oblivion device” for not only the viewer but also the artist herself. By subordinating one’s action to the system of repetition, one’s self is worn down along with the materials. There, the artist’s judgment of actions, which is usually required on a steady basis in the process of making artwork, is being indefinitely postponed. Shiroki’s re-encounter with the forms in the exhibition space is bet on this amnesiac paralysis of the artist’s self. Now, we can go back to the first question. If her work is a devoted attempt to create such forms that cut open the world, what may this suggest? Probably, what is latent is the overturning of the value of a certain aesthetic concept. In her work, different parts are accumulated so as to stand on the floor, or be propped up against the wall. In other words, her sculptures are exposed to excessive effects of gravity, while counting on the structured steadiness rooted in the repetitive and consecutive usability of tools. Here, contiguity more to the everyday is disclosed, through visualization of the heteronomy of gravity, which rules the space on the vertical axis, as well as resonance that comes from the doubling of the two repetitive actions of making and installing. It is this bi-directional stream of traffic between the institutional space of art and the everyday space, in addition to the deprivation of the meaning as tools, which results in a qualitative shift in the forms of her work. In this sense, it is quite impressive that Shiroki sometimes conducts the act of installing her work in front of an audience in the exhibition space. By disclosing the process of its re-composition, the essential temporality of the current state of the installation is visually presented, and the viewer can feel the dynamics of the networking of actions more vividly.
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Possible destinations of such bi-directional streams, revolutionizing the conventional one-way traffic, are infinitely diverse. It may lead to connecting the human Unwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and that of animals, where sharable forms, beyond the difference of our cognitive functions, are explored. Or, it may present unsteady states of forms due to the oscillation of the value concepts of “matter-form,” which has long underpinned art so strongly. In any case, what Shiroki looks at are shapes of the techniques to aesthetically re-arrange sculpture, and consequently we look at such techniques embodied in the physical forms of her work re-arranged in space. In terms of renewability of techniques through the complicated network of actions, the forms of Shiroki’s sculptures, essentially speaking, are temporary and open for re-formation. Keisuke Mori Art critic and curator at the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum
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same as body temperature/ Pocket right side, Pocket left side 2009 Oak 121 Ă— 130 Ă— 15 cm
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Shifting to and fro between functionality and abstraction, my work deals with various actions and processes – natural dynamics, human behavior patterns toward materials, and physical phenomena occurring within the medium, the form, and the work itself. Sculptural structures of my work first evoke the viewer’s recollection, because they seemingly resemble chairs or tables, or furniture fragments such as wooden grids or frames, but then deconstruct the memory because their functionality is oriented toward disappearance and oblivion. Thus, a situation is created, where the existence of things is only defined by the materiality of the presented object and the viewer looking at it. In some of my work, repetition functions as a process leading to oblivion of self in a way similar to how letters start to appear just as black lines when one would write the same word again and again with a pencil on paper. As a result of the concurrence of paper and graphite, the repeated letters unfold a world where two different states run in parallel. Treating the autonomous actions that occur in-between self defined by things, and things defined by self, as anonymous techniques, my work is an attempt to unfold and interpret this double world, which oscillates between perpetuallyrepeated recollections of things and oblivion of formulas or self. Asako Shiroki
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1979
Born in Tokyo, Japan
2003
Graduated in Metal Carving, Department of Crafts,
Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
2005
Completed Master’s Degree in woodworking, Tokyo University of the Arts
2008
Completed Ph.D. program in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts
2008 - 2011
Worked as an assistant lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts
2009 -
Worked as a lecturer at Chiba University, Chiba, Japan
2011 - 2013
Worked as a lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
2013 -
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Fellowship under the Pola Art Foundation Overseas Study Programme
2013 -
Visiting scholar at Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany
2013 -
Participates in the International Studio Programme in KĂźnstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Solo Exhibitions
2011
Statements from Galleries “Focusing on a New Generation in Tokyo 2011”:
Replaying the World – The Understanding of Life, gallery 21yo-j, Tokyo, Japan
Touching Uncertainty, SKKY|iTohen,Osaka,Japan
Asako Shiroki, feel art zero 0, Nagoya, Japan
2009
between here and there, SAN-AI GALLERY +contemporary art, Tokyo, Japan
2007
Asako Shiroki, Maruzen Nihonbashi Display Window, Tokyo, Japan
Scenery of Fluctuation – Transparent Complex, Gallery HANA, Tokyo, Japan
Group Shows
2013
Examination Display for the 3rd New Artists Exhibition, Kawaguchi City Art Gallery ATLIA, Japan
2012
Small Size Works: Statements from Galleries “Focusing on a New Generation in Tokyo 2012”, gallery 21yo-j,
Tokyo, Japan
Faculty Exhibition at the Tokyo University of the Arts, The University Art Museum, Tokyo
University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
2011
IMMEDIATE ISSUE, CSID showroom Medamothi, Combremont-Le-Petit, Switzerland
Small Size Works: Statements from Galleries “Focusing on a New Generation in Tokyo 2011”,
Gallery Natzuka b.p, Tokyo, Japan
Skin & Map II: “Ways to approach Memory and Time”, Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
39ART Nezumi kou, RED CUBE Project Room, Tokyo, Japan
Hitotoki, the former villa of Denbe Kamiya,
2010
2010 Asia Art Fairnale, Haslla Art World Museum, Gangneung, Korea
Transformation in Plaster Cast Gallery, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
Temporary Modern Art Museum, Former Fukawa Elementary School, Ibaragi, Japan
Small Size Works: Statements from Galleries “Focusing on a New Generation in Tokyo 2010”,
Gallery Natzuka b.p, Tokyo, Japan
A Chair Taking Shape, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan
Toyota Art Competition 2010, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan
Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan
2009
Nakanojo Biennale 2009, Nakanojo, Japan
EXHIBITION C-DEPOT 2009 – message, Spiral / Wacoal Art Centre, Tokyo, Japan
monochrome, SHINSEIDO, Tokyo, Japan
red, Gallery Shorewood, Tokyo, Japan
From ◯ to □, Geidai Art Plaza, Tokyo, Japan
2008
8 colors 8 pieces, Gallery Okariya, Tokyo, Japan
Art group Zougei, Oiso Gallery Fuu, Oiso, Japan
2007
The Doctoral Program Final Exhibition, University Art Museum,
DAY BY DAY – daily–journey–dream, Children Museum, Funabashi, Japan
2006
Japan-Korea Academic Exchange, Chung-ang University and Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
DIVISION – Related Paragraph, SAN-AI GALLERY +contemporary art, Tokyo, Japan
2005
From Wood by Hands, Torindo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
International Exhibition, Daegu University, Gyeongsan, Korea
Graduation Works Exhibition, University Art Museum,
2003
Metal, Ceramic, and Urushi, Motoazabu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
Graduation Works Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan
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Editor Asako Shiroki Art Direction & Design Jan Lindenberg Text Contribution pp. 21-23: Keisuke Mori, new commission, 2012. Translation Yuki Okumura (from the Japanese) Proofreading Linda Dennis & Greg Wilcox Photography Tadasu Yamamoto: pp. 8-13 All other images taken by the artist.
Š 2013 Asako Shiroki, the authors and photographers. All rights reserved. www.asakoshiroki.com
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Front and back cover images: between 0 and 2 (detail) (p. 5, for more information)
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A s a ko Shirok i Replaying the World
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