The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

169 Hiraki Sawa Active stillness Hiraki Sawa’s video animations are eloquent reflections on ideas of time and motion, home and place. Having lived in both London and Kanazawa for many years, the themes of travel, mobility and distance are important references for Sawa, and his works transport ordinary objects into the realms of the subconscious and the surreal. Recurrent motifs include aircraft, Ferris wheels and rocking horses, which trace journeys ‘from one place to another, and back again’. 1 Sawa’s recent works are immersive, spatial installations of image and sound which explore concepts of abstract motion or ‘active stillness’. 2 Hako 2006 is a six-channel work tracing changes in the landscape through the imagery of a nuclear power station, model domestic interiors, and an ancient Shinto shrine that is rebuilt every 20 years. 3 Out of the blue 2009 is a two-channel video installation. One is a sequential narrative of shadows cast by isolated objects in a domestic space, the other is a single continuous shot of people walking languidly up and down a steep sand dune, its measured tracking shots in slow motion highlighting the physical and perceptual interactions that occur in one’s passage through a particular terrain. Commissioned for APT6, O 2009 is a multi-channel installation featuring a soundtrack by London-based composer Dale Berning. It builds on the artist’s interest in journeys and cycles, while also considering expression as a continuous flow, using the circle as a poignant visual metaphor. The work is comprised of ten short films of spinning objects, as well as a three-channel projection which traverses the moon’s surface, the empty interiors of an abandoned house, and the vast expanses of the Central Australian desert, which Sawa visited in April 2009. Tracing a circuit starting and ending in Alice Springs, Sawa travelled between the rust red ranges and the bleached spinifex terrain of the desert landscape: A round trip takes you on the same route twice but in opposite directions. You end up where you began, and in between nothing takes place. You drive up a road and see the world on either side as it is. Driving back down again covers the same ground, the world on either side does not move or change, yet seen from behind, everything is different. I am interested in this active stillness . . . 4 Towards the end of his journey, Sawa encountered the ancient meteorite crater of Tnorala (Gosse Bluff), a place of cultural significance to the Western Arrernte people, as well as a site of international scientific interest. 5 The projection depicts a bird circling low over the seabed, as a tugboat travels across the frame against a background of spinning wind turbines. The crater is depicted from above, revealing the mounds and cracks in the rock walls. Inherent in this sequence is the artist’s focus on the elemental: the wind, the sea and the earth, all moving in an unbroken flow. Images of swaying grass and rippling clouds shift the viewer’s focus between the composition as a whole and the minute and intricate details, where countless patterns are revealed. Complementing the vast, unpeopled spaces of the desert are scenes of the dusty interiors of an abandoned house: There is a home in the mountains near the river near the sea. It is tall and it is old and its floors are of cracked, red clay. It is full of things in piles and heaps and layers, yet empty of both absence and presence. It has known too many people and framed too many lives to be missing only one of these. 6 This focus on a neglected domestic space, once occupied and lively, reflects on the cycles of life, and is augmented by an enchanting exploration of the surface of the moon as it orbits the earth. Sawa’s ten short films in O 2009 feature individual objects — a glass bottle, a brass bell, a china bowl — which endlessly spin; an action which contradicts their purpose. The china bowl jerkily rotating on its base, for example, is an incongruous and comical inversion of its function. Hiraki Sawa’s emphasis on action over narrative creates an absorbing and compelling study of momentum and balance, continuity and repetition. The soundtrack reinforces the non-linearity of his approach. It is a composition of spinning sounds and silences played on rotating speakers. As Sawa says, ‘Coming full circle is movement without displacement. In that time, you simply are, and all change is in the looking’. 7 Mellissa Kavenagh Endnotes 1 Hiraki Sawa, artist statement in an email to the author, 18 September 2009. 2 Sawa, artist statement. 3 The Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, is completely reconstructed every 20 years as part of the Shinto belief in the cycle of renewal in nature; it is also a way of passing building techniques from one generation to the next. 4 Sawa, artist statement. 5 Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) is an ancient site over 142 million years old, and is located 175 kilometres west of Alice Springs. According to both Aboriginal culture and scientific interpretation, the site is celestial in origin. 6 Sawa, artist statement. 7 Sawa, artist statement.