Parasophia 2015: Emiko Kasahara, Pt II

II.


TSR 14 (2014), detail. Photo Takashi Otaka.

ART iT: In your section of the Parasophia catalogue, you clarify the politics by including detailed captions for the images that you used, and adding a text on the historical context. I think this makes evident your strong concern for politicality in aesthetics, prompting viewers to reflect on these issues. Thinking about how you have abstracted the process and its results in your works to date, it seems you did it in a more direct way this time. Did that have something to do with exhibiting in Kyoto?

EK: When I went for my site visit at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, I had the feeling you get when the last piece of the puzzle falls into place. Without any connection to Parasophia I had already been going to the former Manchurian territories and Siberia for research, but it turned out that the historical backdrop to my research is exactly the same as that of the museum. Walking through this marble-coated building, I had the sense I was moving backwards in time. Because artists were given a lot of freedom in working on the catalogue, I decided to make a chessboard-like layout with photographs that would hint at the conceptual background of K1001K and TSR 14, intentionally mixing contemporary images that I had shot myself with older, historical images. And then I exerted the utmost caution in not allowing personal views to enter into the explanations accompanying the photographs. There is no doubt this was possible because it was a book and not the work itself. So maybe since I was already researching aspects of modernity in Japan, getting this chance to exhibit at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art was connected to my being prompted into a more direct expression.
Actually, K1001K was my first time working with ceramics but I have been interested in it for some time, and I think this was the best possible way to incorporate it into a work. In contrast to the freedom that is possible with a sculptural figure, ceramic production is premised upon standards that require delicacy, and it becomes a critique of the fantasy of freedom in art. In being fired as porcelain, the missing parts of the ceramic grenades link together relations that are considered to be opposites, like past and present, freedom and restriction, and, I think the denial of freedom paradoxically strongly evokes issues of freedom.

ART iT: That’s a bit different from what you’ve done so far. I thought that you were always hungry to create new systems that have never existed before. So it was at least a surprise when you jumped into making work within a historical context – into a pre-existing, restrictive system.  

EK: Freedom and restriction are two sides of the same coin. It’s the contradictory idea that in order to evoke thoughts on freedom, you have to approach it from the other side. This kind of idea actually appears often in my works. If someone were to ask me whether it is possible to produce a new system that has never previously existed, I think I would reply with a conditional yes.  
As soon as a new system comes into existence it becomes old. My means of recollection produces the moment when the new system is born. The maintenance is a different question. This goes back to what we were saying earlier about arranging together things that were originally different.
In the Baroque period, when knowledge and power were intimately connected, libraries were owned by monasteries. Knowledge written by hand on parchment was compiled into hand-stitched books with roundback binding, and displayed in rooms with majestic Baroque decorations. I think this image of roundback books stacked together so as to look like drapery is part of what supported the essence of Baroque style. But each of the books buried within this continuity of “drapery” is actually different, and even each page in each book is covered in all kinds of knowledge that has been carved there by hand, as it were, out of completely different papers. If you only look at it visually, only the decoration of the curved spines of the books is emphasized, which is nothing more than style, but when you think about the massive amount of differences contained therein, the significance changes for this apparently unified “drapery.”
This kind of mass of authority exists invisibly within the Baroque library, which at first glance seems so majestic and beautiful. I am attracted to this kind of situation, where everything is compressed within the image of an airy drape, but without revealing the purpose or background. I think the same thing could be said for the relations between freedom and restriction, and the existing and the new, as well. This kind of situation has had a big influence on how I show my works.


Spread from the catalogue of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, courtesy Emiko Kasahara and Parasophia Office. Presented on a separate page, captions for each image included the following: “01. Entry of repatriation ship Takasago-maru to Maizuru port. In the 13 years after 1945, 426 repatriation ships entered the port carrying about 660,000 repatriates. / Kyoto Prefecture, Japan.”

ART iT: But on the other hand, as you were saying just now, you are also attracted to the black hole.  

EK: More than an attraction, I think you could call it an awareness that knowledge ultimately leads to a black hole. But this awareness is not the result of a formalized discourse, and is more like the cross-section of a reality that appears as a result of constantly challenging, failing and thinking every time, and it is an important factor in distinguishing my works from just formal beauty.

ART iT: In the catalogue you mix photographs that you took yourself with older photographs for which the copyrights have expired. 

EK: I actually chose the new photographs based on their similar qualities to the old photographs. 

ART iT: The images that were selected are of places and things that evoke the latter stages of imperialism, while the caption information makes clear the reality of the past and history. But then why did you want to remove the actual dates from the photos themselves? In the captions, even as you show the history of the events that the subjects experienced or contain, the times of the photographs themselves are erased in their equivalence.

EK: In this way I thought I could tighten the focus on what is depicted in the photographs without getting sidetracked by the dates when they were shot, and shake up the thinking that is constrained by the system of time.  
Like the way that the past is the present and the present the past, maybe it is possible to revive the images of the photographs by mapping them on to your own existence. For example, it’s hard to tell whether the photograph from the Amur River was taken recently or at the end of the war, but looking at the surrounding images and reading the captions provides an opportunity to think about why the photograph dates are obscured.
For me, it’s not that I wanted to show current photographs as if they were old, but rather that I wanted to bring back to life old things, historical things, which I feel have become distanced from us, and have them close enough to almost feel them on my skin. Even though the captions elucidate all kinds of historical facts, there are also things I didn’t do. Or I actually included information that is considered extraneous, almost like cutting up a dictionary. I thought that when you put it all together, it becomes like a social matrix in which historical and personal facts are mixed together.

ART iT: In adding these captions you are clearly bringing ideology into the situation, right? 

EK: Yes. But the moment you bring in ideology, its significance gets erased once it is arranged equivalently with other ideas. It’s the same as the collection boxes lined up one by one in Offering. I want for the work’s background and development, and the ideas that are elicited by the visual impression, to be guided each by their own measure without getting stuck on only one element.  
Because my theory itself is like a fiction, this is for me the least false way, although it’s not the only thing. I am not seeking a single understanding of the work. In the process of making the work, I come up with a number of ideas, which I then reject or question, and then I repeat the process of thinking and rejecting. It is impossible to have an interpretation that follows a single line of thought.


Both: Installation view, Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Courtesy Emiko Kasahara and Parasophia Office.

ART iT: But I have the sense that theory is a stronger presence in the new works. This might have to do with the fact that the works were made over a shorter period, but maybe it allows for the viewers to reflect upon it themselves and comprehend it as their own theory. In any case, I have the sense of being guided by the elements that you present.
 
EK: Certainly K1001K was produced over a short period. It was intense, like a mad dash over a short distance. There are all kinds of works and approaches, so if one thing comes out more focused, there are also things that are more general.  
The prospect of revealing the thinking and the process behind the work was something that I actually considered in light of the character of the exhibition. Maybe we could say that the concept page in the catalogue is the result of that. But if you were to ask me whether this is an ideological thing, I would say it has nothing to do with that. The amount of time one has for making works over a lifetime is so short, and if I took 10 years every time to make a work like Offering, it probably wouldn’t amount to more than four exhibitions. Maybe because Offering gave me the satisfaction of the long-distance runner, this time I was more inclined toward trying a sprint.

ART iT: What do you think about the possibility that the work could appear didactic when its background and themes are explained by someone else? In particular, with regard to K1001K, the nature of modern Japanese industry could be viewed as one of the themes, and I think this leaves it open to being interpreted as an attempt to shine a light on a historical occlusion, which would be counter to your intentions. That is, perhaps because it’s an easy theme to account for, even if it is not an impediment to an open appreciation of the work, there is the potential that it could over-determine the interpretation, which is something I imagine you actually want to resist.

EK: I resist it, and I think the working process does not in any way invite a one-sided view of things. But I admit that the theme of addressing the ceramic grenades and the existence of the ceramicists all across the country who produced them does have an aspect that invokes associations with one-dimensional interpretations of didacticism or over-determination.  
It’s an extremely Leftist reaction, and it’s something I anticipated to an extent, and maybe the material was simply not as open as I imagined. But even so, that’s not the point of the work. Because K1001K is dealing with modernity, war, weapons and ceramics, it inevitably lends itself to heavy-handed scenarios about the tragedy of war, the tragedy of ceramics, the tragedy of art, and I was attempting to invert that by firing and giving reality to the missing parts, while turning the existing fragments into things that do not exist in reality.
It’s also extremely important that in the form of these pot-like ceramic grenades, the inside and outside exist in parallel. I was really particular about the difference in detail between the glazed interiors and the exteriors marked with the “K1001K” sign. And also the atmosphere of the installation, where each difference is erased.
So even if it’s material that is easily swept up in a grand narrative, the part of the work that is displayed – the core of the work – resides in the multi-layered politics of something that cannot be easily explicated. In Offering, too, these questions that cannot be explicated, these incredibly ambiguous and complex issues, become the work. I think this is something that is absolutely necessary in art.
In order to express this, if you include simplified, hint-like elements in the work then you are bringing in lies. It’s not so easy to define, but it’s incredibly important. This kind of fiction based on preexisting concepts, like using lies or making things easier to understand, is not art. Many people confuse this kind of “collusion” for the strength of the work, but it has nothing to do with intelligence or aesthetics and is only the application of an ornamental intensity, a kind of superficial way of making the work look bigger than it is.
But the tricky thing is that once you understand that secret, and you start deciding to rein in the context because you think it will be too strong under the given circumstances, then you can end up with a kind of dead aesthetics. It’s really difficult to understand how to guide the work without being too controlling, and it’s something that I am really aware of. In my case, when I think about where I want to go with the work, I often return to the original scene that inspired me in the first place. There is always a reason there, and I go back repeatedly, and go through a repeated back-and-forth of questions and answers.


K1001K (2015), detail. Photo Kazuhito Matsumoto, courtesy Emiko Kasahara and Parasophia Office.

ART iT: But in that sense I think the two works included in Parasophia actually provide many hints. It’s just that maybe your concern is a bit broader than that, so that it’s not just about the relations between art and politics, or about the places that were part of the history of modern Japan, or even the end of the age of imperialism. I just thought that as strong as themes are in this work, the expansion of your concerns might be difficult to communicate.

EK: Both “forms” and “things” remain. In Changchun, the imperial-style building that served as the general headquarters of the Kwantung Army during the Manchukuo period still remains. The building has an incredibly authoritarian design, with a façade that evokes Japanese castles and fortifications, and it’s surprising to think that it was built there in such a frank display of colonialism, but what is even more amazing is that the building now serves as the home of the Jilin Communist Party of China Provincial Committee, so the contents have changed and it’s another form of authority, but the colonial legacy continues.  
This is exactly the ambivalence of ending up as a “thing” or “form,” and I am interested in this dualistic or even multivalent aspect of the values of things. But the “things” that actually appear in my work are not as explicit as that building, and instead avoid the most obvious approach, as in my choice of working with collection boxes instead of religious sculpture or painting in the case of Christianity.
Obviously, researching religious sculpture would allow for far more associations with historical incidents, tragedies and atrocities, but because of that there are already numerous, shared, standard interpretations and responses to such a theme that already exist, which cuts off the potential for multi-layered interpretation.
I think the sense of interest that was aroused from seeing the collection boxes was probably more along the lines of something that could not be provided by the logic of already established values and interpretations, and it offered more possibilities for escaping the structure of looking.
On top of that, another important thing is that there are so many collection boxes. The fact that it’s not one massive thing, but just one among several big things was what made me want to escape from the structure of absolute values. I feel that its power comes from the fact that you have several similar things lined up together, and even if the form and significance are the same, they are still different objects made by many people, instead of being one big sculptural work.

ART iT: Instead of each individual thing, it’s a case of an accumulation of things that have been abstracted? 

EK: Yes. I think if there had only been one collection box in the church I wouldn’t have been interested. The fact that there are literally a countless number of collection boxes, which are made anonymously, and that these strange things are being used by a countless number of people – that context was really important for me.
If you have people with different ways of thinking who assemble one by one, those differences become equally different, and it’s possible to escape from singular values or absolute structures. Rather than integrating the whole into one body, I feel potential precisely in the act of accumulating singularities – in the accumulation of unique, individual variations.

Pt I

Emiko Kasahara: Between Void and Mass

Copyrighted Image