NOBUYUKI OSAKI

Nobuyuki Osaki is an artist who creates projection art, installations and sculptures that help us to recognise how little of the world around us we truly comprehend. Originally graduating from the Kyoto City University of Arts in the year 2000 specialising in printmaking, Osaki has been continually expanding his artistic vocabulary to include movement and time whilst simultaneously deconstructing the reality he creates for us.

The World, a series that he began in 2009, is representative of Osaki’s recent work, which uses a technique he calls “Melting Images.” The World depicts magnificent scenes from nature, populated with small human figures with a tenuous hold on the ground beneath them. These pictures are actually video projections of his landscape paintings that slowly drip down the gallery walls until the image transforms into abstract swirls of colour. A touch of humour and whimsicality is introduced as the human figures and objects, instead of melting, lose hold of the painting that is dissolving underneath them and fall off the wall. The effect of the melting pictures are not made using computer graphics, but is a painstaking organic form of animation where he films his paintings as he allows them to melt. Osaki pays great attention to how the painting dissolves and he produces several paintings for each piece, selecting the one that most perfectly captures the life-cycle of an artwork from completion to destruction. This is one of the recurring themes throughout Osaki’s oeuvre, who often asks the viewer to draw the line between figurative and abstract, life and death, reality and fiction.

Osaki employed the same technique in his Portraits (2010) series, where instead of the universality and sublimity of nature, he melts away human faces—the most intimate and sentimental motif to all of us. Even if we don’t know the sitter, it is both unsettling and strangely beautiful to witness the progression from a beautiful portrait to something that is hardly-recognisable as human over the course of 5-10 minutes. The expressions seem to change, but that is perhaps only our own subjective point of view. Osaki’s portraits are formalistic exercises, but it is impossible to divorce it from our own emotional attachment. In some installations of Portrait, he even projects them onto the wall via a handheld mirror, or further humanises the people behind the faces by placing personal objects next to the works.

In Dimension Wall (2012), Osaki concentrates even more on the formalistic potential of his video technique. In it, he projects a black-and-white flower wallpaper pattern onto the entire back wall of the gallery. Slowly, but subtly the floral patterns grow thicker and heavier as they turn into a thick viscous liquid that oozes down the picture. Over time, this installation begins to melt away not just the wall behind it, but the entire space it occupies. His series Scribbles (2012), uses the same technique with simply scribbled lines on a LCD screen that extend beyond the screen onto the gallery wall behind. As the lines on the screen turn black, the protruding lines on the wall are a constant reminder of how it once looked.

Osaki also seeks to incorporate his works into tangible pieces, including thick impasto paintings of Dimension Wall; the flower pattern in selected stages in its journey to pure darkness. This idea of the malleability of physical objects is something that Osaki has addressed countless times over his career, including his sculptural series of objects sinking into the surface below it as if in hot lava. These include a pile of pencils, a ceramic plate, a sello-tape dispenser and a hot cup of coffee.

Nobuyuki Osaki has received several prestigious art awards, such as the Fine Work Award at VOCA 2013, and he has held solo and group exhibitions all over Japan, and as far afield as Germany, China and Boston. His work is a part of the public/private collections of the Machida City Museum of Print Art, Tokyo; the Kyoto City Museum of Art; Kyoto City University of Arts, the Contemporary Print Center, Sannohe; and the Sekiguchi Private Museum of Art, Tokyo.

Text by Ruben van Mansum