NOBUHIRO SHIMURA

Nobuhiro Shimura is a video projection artist who uses light as his medium to create site-specific installations that allow us to perceive and interact with environments in totally new ways. “My works always use video images, but the content of them is more than just the images,” he says. His practice is concerned with the relationship between images, the space and participants, and with elevating the significance of the space itself.

Shimura’s graduation pieces from the Musashino Art University, titled Translate (2007) reveal the direction he would go on to take. Projected onto numerous tryptich panels laid flat at shin-height, are video images of everyday objects that appear to fall onto the surfaces. They include shiny brass push-pins, candy-coloured paperclips, plastic clothes-pegs and sharped new pencils. All of them appear much larger than life-size, and appear to materialise and then bounce around and sometimes off the panels. In this way, not only are the spaces transformed, but the oversized scale of the ordinary objects and the ability for the viewer to navigate through them create the opportunity for them to uncover yet-unexplored relationships with the images depicted and the spaces they occupy.

Another early work, Pierce (2008) depicts foliage and trees moving in the wind projected onto a bed of 330,000 pins, creating an organic, yet digitalized rendition of nature. Shimura also creates on a macro-scale, such as in Bucket Garden (2012), a well-used tin bucket of water in which lights swirl around in endless patterns, creating a universe of fireflies and auroras in a space that is by definition contained. Other pieces cast light and images onto other unusual surfaces, like tin-foil on a brick-gallery wall, a cement-coated rose, a curtain of semi-transparent plastic ribbons, or the surface of the water in a Japanese-style bath-house. This allows us to grasp the textures of the surfaces he illuminates, as well as realising the physicality and substantiality of light.

Besides Nobuhiro Shimura’s appropriation of gallery-spaces, he often exhibits in outdoor and public spaces. An iconic work of his from 2009, Red Shoes, is a projection of red sneakers on the ground in an otherwise non-descript alleyway. Shimura purposely chose a “dim” and “slightly scary” alleyway as the site for this work, which continued for a month during the 2009 Koganecho Bazaar in Yokohama. Over this period of time, not only visitors to the Bazaar viewed it, but people from the neighbourhood—young and old—came to see and play with this attraction. Shimura delighted in how it changed not only with the interaction of the locals, but also the different effects when it rained. Two years later for the same event, Nobuhiro was awarded with the Koganecho Bazaar Award which was chosen by the local community.

A slight departure from his projection work, Hundreds of Boots (2013) was 108 candles created using discarded rubber boots as the mould. Arranged to compliment the architecture of the Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Shimura pushes the envelope on what it means to be an artist who literally uses light as his medium.

Using projected light as a medium allows him to create ambitious—even grandiose—works that are not physically demanding of the space he uses, and because of the dramatic transformation of otherwise familiar places, they are inviting to gallery-goers and passers-by alike. One interesting thread that runs through his oeuvre is that although all his work is playful and welcoming, there is a total absence of the depiction of people. Often a human presence is suggested, but the spaces and environments he creates are devoid of them. Even the shoes depicted in his works literally remain empty. It is entirely up to the viewer to step into the work and provide the essential element that makes Nobuhiro Shimura’s work so thoroughly human.

Shimura graduated with an MA from Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences at the Musashino Art University in 2007, and over the last decade he has been holding an increasing number of solo exhibitions around the Greater Tokyo Area. He has participated in group exhibitions around Japan, and as far abroad as Busan and Melbourne. He also undertook a residency in Taipei.
His work is represented in the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, the Daisuke Miyatsu Collection, and the RMIT University Art Collection, Melbourne.