[Title] Within the Eye’s Lens
[Artist] Haruka Kojin
[Date] September 16 – November 16, 2010
“I boarded a highway express bus, and settled in for the ride. Soon, I was gazing at the asphalt road surface, which seemed to flow by in close harmony with the vehicle’s speed.
“Continuing to stare at this rolling image, my vision locked into one point in the asphalt grain. A single particle appeared to rush up before my eyes, swelling in dimension. As if keeping time with the music flowing from my headphones, the image was repeated again and again in a rhythmical beat.
“There are times when the moon appears hypertrophied in size. One explanation offered for that phenomenon is that the overlapping in the atmosphere acts as a magnifying lens. If so, then perhaps the speed of the bus was acting to momentarily compress space, with that functioning in a lens-like role. That, and other vague intuitions of the physical world worked their way through my mind.
“The individual grains of asphalt release a dull black color and odor, implausibly born of this world. They sustain a pattern of expansion and contraction, while steadily moving beyond the realm of time and space to connect with a variety of cosmic dust never seen before. This sight appeared coincidentally through the window of a bus out on the road, which I had boarded in an attempt to journey far away. It swiftly moved into close quarters, whisking my eyes off to realms even more remote.”
This lens-like world plays out across the full surface of a creation by artist Haruka Kojin. Deep in the realm of lenses of all different sizes, emerging as some sort of crystallization, colorful shapes flicker and waver in misty illusion. Much like the dreamy motion of scenery viewed from aboard a merry-go-round. Approaching for a closer look, from within the individual lenses a rich range of Hermès objects appear to take on greater size, turn upside-down and assume other modes of movement. Through the medium of the lens, product creations alter their forms at will, stimulating the imaginative powers of those who willingly peer into their depths.
Haruka Kojin
A native of Hiroshima Prefecture (born in 1983), Haruka Kojin completed her master’s degree at the Department of Inter Media Art, Tokyo University of the Arts in 2009. Honored with the Grand Prix Prize at the 2007 Art Award Tokyo, she became active as an artist from that same year. Her creations have been on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo and other prestigious art museums in Japan and abroad.