Truth in Akira Kurosawa’s gripping film ‘Rashomon’ is evasive and dithering until the viewers realise the impossibility of arriving at a finite ending.
“There’s no truth,” Japanese artist Ryota Kuwakubo tells The Hindu taking about his crowd-pulling kinetic installation or sculpture in motion, ‘LOST #12’ that is part of a series of works focusing on shadow play.
LOST stands as much for ‘Light, Object, Space, and Time’ as for the feeling of ‘getting lost’ in the phantom landscape mapped out by his electronic art work, says the artist, who has been working on such installations for nearly five years.
His installation, at Aspinwall House, comprises a small-point light source fitted to a moving toy train which chugs along the rails around several locally-collected articles arranged on the floor. As the train’s light closes in on the objects, a pageant of moving images, including those of the viewers, get highlighted on the walls of the exhibition space.
Unique imagery
“My interest lies in sharing my experience with the viewers, but a la ‘Rashomon’, each viewer sees a different image of the installation and views the work differently. The imagery denotes something unique for the individual viewer, who unknowingly draws on his/her experience to relate to it,” he says. “The same experience in a given space and time can offer different experiences for different people. It could trigger a different strain of thought or idea.”
Mr. Kuwakubo says the shift to kinetic installations marked his departure from ‘materials (as he used to make gadgets earlier) to things that are beyond materials’ – concepts and ideas.
It’s a means to draw the attention of people to things that are too conspicuous to take note of.
Graduated in art and design, Mr. Kuwakubo once spotted his young son’s exhilaration at ‘seeing’ things. “He was crying out names of each and every object as everything was new to him. No grown up does that. The pleasure of seeing things, I realised, should be brought back.”
‘The cheapest way’
And kinetic sculptures can be interesting when the source of light moves by itself to create the shadow play. It is the cheapest, easiest and most subtle way of translating the idea, says the artist.
Mr. Kuwakubo was spotted by KMB’14 curator Jitish Kallat at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial where he had exhibited a work from the series.
“I’m bad at history. Japanese contemporary art is less concerned about history, so there’s no explicit contextualisation of my work within Japanese civilization. But my appreciation of darkness has come from the Japanese tradition,” says Mr. Kuwakubo, who plans to take the work to Delhi.
