[Title] window garden
[Artist] Izumi Kon
[Date] October 31 – December 17, 2002
This window display is in collaboration with Izumi Kon, a young Japanese female artist. The window has been transformed into a poetic space by the gentle Japanese touch and the artist’s own unique sensibility.
The first act of the two-part piece is filled with the atmosphere of Christmas. The 2002 Fall/Winter collection is drawn onto the panel by the artist’s “hand,” coexisting with the actual products. There is the supple ladies’ leather coat, the brilliant scarves… Kon’s preferred item, shoes, are also drawn with acrylic paint. All products are perfectly copied, but upon careful reflection, one notices minute patterns made with lame. One can see in this work the artist’s unique pictorial structure, which brings forth decorativeness to the forefront.
The window is separated into front and back spaces, giving the impression of depth. What divides the two spaces is the off-white Corian board. In the board is a square hole, through which one can glimpse a fruit tart drawn in the back right. It is an objet that she found in a book and felt inclined to draw. The torso, upon which a coat is hung, is finished like a canvas for drawing pictures.
Inside the square framed in white, there stands erect a panel with scarf patterns pasted onto it. Before it is a series of lighting boxes… perhaps reminiscent of shōji (sliding paper screen) or fusuma (framed and papered sliding door). Although the artist did not consciously employ the Japanese style, one can feel that the work is structured with a “Japanese spirit” through glimpses of decorative methods and uses of color.
Within the calm serenity, the glimmering Christmas window is presented with elegance.
Izumi Kon
Born in Tokyo in 1977. Finding objects that make her “want to draw” from various sources such as magazines, Kon uses acrylic paint to draw on box-shape panels covered in cotton cloth. She establishes her own unique style in employing minuteness and the decorativeness of lame upon a “Japanese” pictorial structure.