Parasophia 2015: Emiko Kasahara, Pt I

BETWEEN VOID AND MASS
By Natsuko Odate


Left: OFFERING – Collection #5 (2014). Right: OFFERING – Collection #27 (2014). All images: Courtesy Emiko Kasahara.

Born in Tokyo in 1963 and currently based in Kanagawa, Emiko Kasahara is best known for works that draw from a wide range of materials including marble, silicon, nylon stockings, fake eyelashes and synthetic fur to investigate representations of femininity and feminine corporeality in contemporary society. Such works can take the form of sculptures, as with the “Subjectified Object” series of basins and other “receptacles” carved from marble, or be realized in more conceptual formats, as in Manus-Cure, a portfolio of 1050 nail color samples presented in grids on neutral backgrounds. In 2000, Kasahara began research on the work that would become Offering, eventually visiting churches in 85 countries across the world to document the collection boxes found there. After an initial presentation in 2005 at the Volkskunde Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria, the work was exhibited in its entirety as part of the Yokohama Triennale 2014.

Kasahara’s latest works were recently on view in Parasophia: The Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture, held from March 7 to May 10 of this year. Responding to the “Imperial crown style” architecture of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, which was built in 1933, Kasahara presented TSR 14, a collection of international coinage flattened on the rails of the Tran-Siberian Railway, and K1001K [in the official work title, the orientation of the last “K” is reversed] (both 2015), an installation of ceramic fragments inspired by the production in Japan of ceramic hand grenades during World War II. ART iT met with Kasahara on the occasion of her participation in Parasophia to learn more about the recent developments in her practice.

I.

ART iT: The first thing I’d like to ask you about is the work you contributed to the Yokohama Triennale 2014, Offering (2005-14), and the works you are showing in Parasophia, K1001K and TSR 14 (both 2015). These works seem to be quite different from the sculpture pieces that you have primarily exhibited to date. As opposed to taking the form of autonomous sculptures, they begin from fieldwork and return to preexisting forms on the basis of intensive research. Could you talk about this shift in your practice?

EK: I have actually made research based works before. In particular, Pink (1996) stands out as a work that opened my eyes to the idea of research. At the time I had just moved to New York, and it was a period when I was able to think about Japanese society and its familial structures from a distance. Because there were privacy issues with the theme of the work, which comprises photographs of the cervixes of different women, I had to explain to people why I wanted to make the work, and then went searching for doctors and women who would cooperate with me. Taking on this process of what could be called fieldwork – in that I was communicating with people with whom I had never met or spoken – was an important opportunity for me. The finished works did not directly represent the excitement I felt when I was making them, or the social issues that emerged during that process, but instead took the form of a series of extremely abstract photographs that evoked color field paintings, or something along those lines. But there is intensive fieldwork behind the works, and the significance of that fieldwork is implied within the works. A gap between the contents of the research and the ultimate form of the work, I think, adds to the intensity of the work, and elevates it to the level of art. It’s not published, but I actually turned all my research into a book. I think it would be interesting to present it in a way that is different from the confrontation with the work.


Above: PINK #2 (1996). Below: OFFERING – Marina (2005).

ART iT: What led you to make Pink?

EK: When it comes to expression in visual arts, it is important that the materials, form, display method and the entire nature of the work all are part of one’s own language, so artists stake everything on that expression. But because of that, only the rigorous practice of making works based on constant self-questioning gets venerated, and it can lead to hollow works. I addressed this kind of expressive stagnation in one of my earliest works, A Flower of Stone (1987-91). And then Pink, for me, was a project that challenged the idea of art as mere façade. I wanted to reflect the truth of reality in the same mirror in which I found myself, and in doing so confront myself.
Maybe the ultimate work revealed a kind of wordless, dead-end reality as an
inexpressible aesthetic experience. The way that there is nothing but a void in the boxes of Offering is similarly connected to the extremely abstracted photographs of Pink. In that sense, even if I carry out fieldwork and do a lot of research, maybe my works are like the abstracted expression of something like a black hole, just as Wittgenstein said about utterances revealing the limits of language.

ART iT: So even while understanding the possibility of a dead-end, with regard to Offering you dedicated yourself to this long-term fieldwork, which seemed almost to possess you, in order to investigate and understand the institution of Christianity.  

EK: With Offering, it was like more and more questions kept arising from the research that was meant to answer the original questions, and it was hard to stop the fieldwork. Things that were unconvincing or that left weird impressions only increased as I visited each location, and began to overlap with each other. There was so much that had to be accounted for. Everything was important, from the slit in the middle of the collection box to the act of putting money inside it, the decorations on the boxes and the fact that these boxes are placed in churches, as well as the history itself of the spread of Christianity across the world. Instead of coming up with a theory and then deciding on the subject of the work, I formed the basis for approaching the subject in response to my first, intuitive suspicions. I processed the thinking on the subject through research ranging from textual research to actually encountering and engaging with things in the real world.
Offering started from a beautiful collection box that I encountered in Pisa. The form, the significance, the way it was placed, the material, all inspired my questions, although at the time I had no idea these questions would allow for so much depth. As a result I ended up spending much more time then I anticipated examining the history and thinking about colonialism. But even here it’s not like everything I saw and thought about is represented in the ultimate form of the work. It’s like I release everything that I gathered inside me back into the elements. In the end, if the work is only about showing the amount of knowledge you have, then it won’t solve anything. My works present questions in a different dimension from that of my knowledge, and these questions are then transferred to the viewers.

ART iT: This idea of returning everything to their elements – is it about abstracting the things that you have seen and touched? Was the use of a standardized, index-like presentation of the photographs in Offering about stripping away meaning in that sense? 

EK: The idea of the index is something that I had actually used before Offering, as in the work Manus-Cure, or Pink, and even in A Flower of Stone. The act of arranging all these different things side by side as if they were the same paradoxically allows for a situation where those differences no longer hold. I think I ended up taking this approach because I am interested in these paradoxical conditions. I think even the latest works, K1001K, and TSR 14, with the coins, could also be considered index-like installations.

ART iT: Earlier you mentioned your critical awareness of colonialism, but do the discoveries you made through your research for Offering have any connection to K1001K and TSR 14? 

EK: I think they are all connected. With Offering, I was researching colonialism, which was deeply implicated in the propagation of Christianity, and that naturally led to an interest in the area around the former Manchukuo, one of the last instances of colonialism at the end of the modern period. Because I was spending so much time working on Offering, a lot of ideas for other works came up at the same time. Almost as soon as Offering went on view at the Yokohama Triennale, I was off to do research in northeast China and the Russian Far East. And at the same time that I was investigating the leftover weaponry, battlefield sites and architecture that remain from that period there, I was also researching the contemporaneous relics that remain in Japan.
It was through this research that I learned about the ammunition factory that formerly existed in Kawagoe near the Binnuma River, and then I learned about the ceramic grenades sent from potters across the country, and how these grenades were all dumped by the river following the end of World War II. When I first went to see the site where the ceramics had been dumped, it was an ambivalent aesthetic experience. I felt I was watching the collection of dead bodies and remains, but it was not necessarily violent or tragic, there was also a quietly beautiful sense of loss. I made K1001K while thinking about the meaning of what I first saw at the Binnuma River.
With the production of TSR 14, as well, the work started from an unforgettable scene. On a visit to the highlands of Bolivia while researching Offering, I came across a railway that crossed the horizon in a straight line, and because it was just at the time when the train, which ran only once a week, was about to pass by, out of sheer curiosity I decided to place a 2 euro coin on the rail and see what would happen. The train came and struck the coin, which flipped up and shone in the air before landing on the ground. When I picked it up, the coin had become just a piece of scrap metal. Surrounded by the stunning contrast between the expansive blue skies and the color of the arid earth of Bolivia, when I took that metal scrap in my hand, I felt that maybe the world had moved just a little bit. It was the kind of powerful, intense aesthetic experience that makes you think, maybe this tiny action could actually change the world. When I looked it up afterward, I learned that this historic railway, which originates from a once-flourishing tin mine and terminates at a port on the Pacific coast, has a complex background that is intertwined with colonial power. Using that railway to strip a Western coin of its significance was really exciting for me, and that eventually led to the production of TSR 14 on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Returning to the ceramic grenades, a big factor in the work was the form of the grenades, which are like these pots with big voids inside them. This is a form that also appears in Pink and Offering. Of course, in my first encounter with the grenades, they were broken fragments, and the void inside that archetypal form really caught my interest. So not only the history and significance of the grenade’s use, but also the form itself caught my eye as an extremely beautiful thing. There was paradoxically a conceptual structure with an active political and social resonance layered over this form, which otherwise has an incredibly corporeal passivity.


Above: OFFERING (2011), installation view at the Yokohama Triennale 2014. Photo Takashi Otaka.

ART iT: Do you think this is related to your return to Japan and the intensity of your concern for the colonialism of modern Japan?  

EK: I wonder. I don’t think there is much of a connection there. But what I recognized from the almost 10 years of research for Offering was that, amid the constant movement and moment-to-moment variations of the world, there is no way my desire for knowledge could ever be completely fulfilled. No matter how much I travel or am informed about political and social issues, things will always continue changing behind my back. The more I know, the stronger my desire for knowledge grows, but I have also come to understand the practical limitation that it is impossible to know everything.
So maybe more than saying that there was an end to the 10 years of research for Offering, I simply felt it was time to stop. I think I learned from this experience how to integrate research and art production, even when I am in a materially limited situation. Whatever the theme, there’s a way to achieve it, and it’s possible to discover diverse ramifications from even the smallest things. In that sense there is no difference between the world and Japan for me.

ART iT: In Offering you continued the research for some 10 years, but even if the theme was constant, was there any difference between the beginning and the latter stages of the project in terms of how you saw things? Or were you consciously trying to stay consistent? At least from viewing the work, one has the sense that you maintained a certain distance through the form of documentation.  

EK: That’s a difficult question. I think I had many doubts. The uncanny bodily experience of registering, from the first collection box in Pisa, this intensity that went beyond visual beauty was something that stayed with me throughout the entire production of the work.
I went to a number of places for the purpose of investigating this uncanny disturbance, but nothing really satisfied me. At first I focused my attention on France and Belgium, to where I was traveling frequently at the time, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough to complete the work. And then I thought I would look at the entirety of Europe, but that also wasn’t right, and gradually the focus expanded from there. So rather than having a structure in mind from the start and then working to fill it out, the research was really chaotic, gradually developing as if I were working around the question by touch.

ART iT: And it was only after you finished your traveling that you decided the final groupings?

EK: In physical terms it happened after I finished my travels, but because I had seen so much, I already had the sense while I was traveling that it would be impossible to define the world through a single framework. I felt a strong resistance to classifying the world based on standards like political, historical or economic connections. Since we are unable to grasp the world only through explicit standards, there is a perverse significance to making visible the ruptures such standards themselves contain. That was why I adopted the register of classification through form. It was not about choosing a random arrangement that denies the existence of standards, but neither was it a means of classification that could be condensed into preexisting contexts. There is neither a denial of the world nor an affirmation of the world. I am opposed to the use of art for directing things into a single direction.

ART IT: But doesn’t the attempt to classifying things through form end up getting prescribed by the rules of aesthetics?

EK: No, because I think that the visual aesthetics represented by form is able to resist being contained by thought.

ART iT: So are you actually trying to use forms based on visual aesthetics to oppose and eliminate so-called politicality?  

EK: No matter what, it is impossible to eliminate politics, because art and politics are codependent. But from the beginning I never thought to classify things based on viewpoints like geography, history or economics, and there was no doubt that I wanted to elicit politics from art, rather than viewing things from the position of politics. I wanted to come up with a system or installation that would show through a straightforward approach the heterogeneity of a politics that resists any single category. The aesthetics of form is a critique of that kind of uniform thinking.


K1001K (2015), detail, installation view at Parasophia: The Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture, 2015. Photo ART iT. The orientation of the last “K” is reversed in the official work title.

ART iT: But hearing these thoughts, I get the sense that in K1001K, the politicality is directly linked to the form. 

EK: Maybe. Had I used the ceramic grenade fragments from the riverside as they are, the politics might have been pigeonholed by the format. Certainly the fragments that I picked up had their own, meaningful beauty, but I was really resistant to using them in that way. I had the sense that, were I to do so, an important part of the thinking process would be lost, and it would be like writing a false chronicle.
That was when I had the opposite idea of making the missing parts of each fragment out of clay. In this way I was able to create the negative parts to these fragments which have such strong political implications – in other words, I was able to create an anti-political existence.
Politics is part of the structure that supports the work, but it’s not the only thing, and that’s where I see the potential for art. In this sense, I think the work is also close to the open politicality of Offering.


Part II

Emiko Kasahara: Between Void and Mass

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