TAKURO TAMURA

The artist takes the Game of Life’s iconic game pieces and expands their size and quantity to an absurd scale. Dispersed throughout the gallery space are colorful cylinders topped with spheres—massive versions of the plastic pegs used in-game to represent individual people. While the originals sport distinct, flat colors for easy identification, Tamura’s adaptations, collectively titled Nomadic Pegs, bear much more complicated facades layered with patterns, gradations, and overlapping coats of paint. The sculptures bring the pawns figuratively closer to reality—their enlarged size makes them significantly harder to move or replace on a whim, reflecting the gravity of the choices offered to the player. The nuanced, multihued surfaces suggest human beings are not as easily categorized in real life as they are in a fictional microcosm; almost everything about us can change according to the people we associate with, or the environment we find ourselves in.

Meanwhile, Tamura’s Flagment series comprises almost 200 stylised flag sculptures, each painted in a unique combination of colours. The flag is a symbol of possession in the Game of Life; players would stake a flag of their designated colour whenever they acquire a building. Affixed to the gallery’s white walls at varying angles, they seem to claim dominion over nothing tangible—a floating signifier. The artist poses the question: if a collector were to purchase the flag, would they essentially be ‘purchasing’ the abstract concept of ownership?

While the flags indicate control, Whence? How? Whereto?, a body of work in which the colourful winding tracks of the Game of Life are jumbled into convoluted masses with no beginning or end in sight, is chaos manifested. Embedded within each tangled web is the signature roulette wheel; although intended to provide the player with guidance, it refuses to do so, continuing to spin for what feels like eternity. While the original board game lays out predetermined paths with specific goals and achievements for the player, the artist’s interpretation embodies how the real world, particularly our information-inundated society, is open to an infinite number of trajectories that can change at any moment. Tamura fully embraces the indetermination of life—he describes his interests, emotions, and objectives as constantly in flux and sees beauty in the nebulous and chaotic, as evidenced by the lack of clear directionality in his labyrinthine roads.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote, ‘The very essence of romance is uncertainty.’ In Tamura’s case, the words ‘The very essence of uncertainty is romance’ may be more fitting; life’s volatility is what makes it worth experiencing for him, as well as what motivates him to create art. The artist detaches familiar objects from their intended functions, even rendering them completely useless at times, as he challenges the viewer to shed their preconceived notions of the universe. Though his work boldly criticizes contemporary society—questioning its structures, norms, and assumptions—it also earnestly encourages us to find wonder and fascination in the unpredictability of our existence.