Range of the Senses: What It Means to “Experience” Today

[Reference image] Kodai NAKAHARA, Text Book, 1995 ©Kodai Nakahara, Photo: Shigefumi Kato, Courtesy of Gallery Nomart

This special exhibition showcases seven artists who have developed experimental practices in the field of contemporary art based on unique perspectives and techniques.

Today, the human race is confronted with a host of difficult problems on a global scale. Our environment has undergone sudden violent changes, exerting a huge influence on the mental state of everyone in the world. Moreover, the emergence of COVID‑19 has exacerbated societal strife. Our way of living has changed dramatically, and as many of the activities in our daily life have been restricted, we have begun question what it means to experience something new.

Under these circumstances, contemporary art has attracted attention as a means of providing people with myriad experiences. Similarly, the works by the seven artists in this exhibition provide us with experiences of different qualities. These range from physical experiences (in works by Takehiro Iikawa and Hajime Imamura), which are accompanied by full-body sensations, to those that trigger physiological reactions beneath the eyelids (Yasuko Iba, Kodai Nakahara, and Kohei Nawa), and thought-provoking experiences that evoke memories and stoke the imagination (Oscar Oiwa and Yasuhiro Fujiwara). Each of the works suggests diverse experiences.

That being the case, you might say that the notion of art as a visual medium has already become a thing of the past. Although sight may still reign as the predominant human sense, contemporary art has become a panesthetic entity that encompasses the entire body. Following an age in which art functioned as a challenge to the human race by attempting to expand the limited potential of sight, we might now see art as an act of cultivating images of a new world that we encounter through the operation of every sensory organ. This might be described as expanding the range of the senses.

Based on the conditions surrounding today’s art and human senses, this exhibition focuses on the current state of these artists’ radical experiments. These efforts are a reflection of the real world and the things that are occurring in it at this very moment. The gallery spaces might be likened to “sensory laboratories.” And the viewer might perceive the works as both complete expressions and variable entities that are in the process of changing into something else. Through this exhibition, it is our hope that as many viewers as possible will have an opportunity to experience the artists’ unique works and the messages that they contain in a setting in which a variety of senses are intertwined.

Artists
Takehiro Iikawa, Yasuko Iba, Hajime Imamura, Oscar Oiwa, Kodai Nakahara, Kohei Nawa, Yasuhiro Fujiwara

Organized by The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Sponsored by Daikin Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Assisted by ANDO TADAO CULTURE FOUNDATION