The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

123 ARTISTS Oku-Kei 13 2017 Oil, acrylic, ink, coloured ink, colour powder, printed matter, photograph, ink-jet print, silk screen print, hemp cloth, cotton cloth, synthetic leather, cheesecloth, silk thread, cotton yarn, adhesive cellophane tape, packing tape, metal, lead, sponge, lichen, plastic, plastic sheet, balsa wood, packing paper, thin paper, Japanese paper, newspaper, wallpaper, and paper in custom frame / 153 x 133 x 9.2cm / Courtesy: The artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Born 1955, Tokyo, Japan Lives and works in Uwajima, Japan When Shinro Ohtake exhibited in APT1 in 1993, Japanese curator Takeshi Kanazawa introduced his work as ‘anti- academic’, manifesting both ‘violent vigour and restrained elegance’. 1 Some 25 years later, Ohtake’s practice maintains this balance of rebelliousness and refinement, rooted in the acts of cutting and pasting images, testing the viscosity and hue of oil paint, and recycling discarded objects. The artist’s dense, voluminous scrapbooks — begun in 1977 and now numbering over 70 — embody the clearest expression of his method, an approach that has expanded into experiments with painting and sculpture, as well as large-scale installations of formidable scale and density. For all the apparent feverish intensity of the surfaces of Ohtake’s works, they are created with great patience, and his methods have evolved slowly over the four decades of his practice. Recently, for example, the subdued greys and browns of the ongoing abstract series entitled ‘Time Memory’ 2011–, constructed from used packing materials, have been complemented by the bold colour and distinct figuration of Oku-Kei 2017–18 (or ‘memory scapes’). ‘Time Memory’ has its origins in Ohtake’s reflection on his mail — having passed through numerous hands, the packaging of the mail he received had ‘already accumulated layers of time and memory’. 2 These richly textured surfaces are pasted onto wooden panels in horizontal and vertical orientations that overlap as if woven, creating vigorous geometrical compositions. The ‘Oku-Kei’ works, on the other hand, are created from cut-out photographs and other found materials, overlaid with sheets of clear acrylic painted with bursts of iridescent colour to create an intense visual field. Luminous blossoms of yellow, green, blue and pink, and patches of white, hover on a plane above scraps of paper, fabric and tape assembled in layers that reveal old film stills, erotic photographs and commercial drawings. Ohtake’s process of selection is impulsive and intuitive, the artist methodically creating layers of material inspired by geological strata, striving for ‘variation of density’ on a given plane, rather than a thematic connection between constituent elements. 3 Ohtake tends to focus on images with ‘diluted’ expressive intent, such as those found in product catalogues, media reportage and illustrated textbooks; however, he is also interested in the way that layering images evokes the jumble of urban streetscapes, the passage of time, and the associative qualities of memories and dreams. Ohtake rejects the term ‘collage’ as a Western concept whose canonical exemplars — the cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque of the early twentieth century — diverge from his own more instinctive experience of cutting and pasting. He points instead to the Japanese tradition of pasting calligraphy and other painted elements onto folding screens, or the way schoolchildren obliterate surfaces with stickers. For Ohtake, the act of pasting is a register of time: ‘the idea of taking the debris left from something that has already passed, putting it in a new context, and admiring it as something completely new’. 4 Accordingly, his work continues to evoke what Kanazawa described in 1993 as ‘metaphysical lines or imprints of reality lost in time’. 5 But, for all its lofty associations, Shinro Ohtake’s practice remains a decidedly material-driven investigation of vision and memory, founded on the daily experience of living in a world saturated with images. 6 Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 ‘The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT1) was held at the Queensland Art Gallery; Takeshi Kanazawa, ‘Shinro Ohtake’, in The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, 1993, p.75. 2 Quoted in Yuka Uematsu, ‘Shinro Ohtake’, in Travellers: Stepping into the Unknown [exhibition catalogue], National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2018, p.52. 3 Quoted in Sunjung Kim, ‘Interview with Shinro Ohtake’, in Shinro Ohtake [exhibition catalogue], Artsonje Center, Seoul, 2012, p.80. 4 Quoted in Manabu Koseki, ‘An interview with Shinro Ohtake: cut + paste’, IDEA , no.319, November 2006, p.124. 5 Kanazawa, p.75. 6 Kanazawa, p.75. SHINRO OHTAKE