Ocula Conversation Sunjung Kim’s Real DMZ Project Interrogates the North and South Korea Divide Ongoing since 2012, the Real DMZ Project interrogates the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea through annual, research-based exhibitions that bring together the works of Korean and international artists. Sunjung Kim, the independent curator behind the project, conceived the idea of exploring the DMZ while curating Japanese artist...
Ocula Report Frieze Week Lowdown: London Shows to See 20 Sep 2019 : Tessa Moldan for Ocula London's galleries and museums are gearing up for a lively October, with Frieze London and Frieze Masters running between 3 and 6 October 2019 at Regent's Park, along with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, taking place across the same dates at Somerset House; and the tenth anniversary of the Sunday Art Fair, showcasing new and emerging artists...
Ocula Insight | Video Mark Bradford’s Call for Unity at Shanghai’s Long Museum 16 August 2019 Mark Bradford walks through Mark Bradford: Los Angeles Mark Bradford: Los Angeles at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai (27 July–13 October 2019) is the artist's largest solo exhibition to date in China. In this video for Ocula, Bradford and Diana Nawi, curator of the show, walk through selected works that convey the artist's concerns with...
I was a kid in the 1960s and at that time, comics and Japanese animation were huge so I wanted to be a cartoonist. They were my heroes. At that time, I didn’t know about art at all but when I was 13 there was a Rembrandt show in Tokyo that my mother took me to. I don’t know why; my mother and family were not into art at all and they had no art background. I remember being completely amazed and it was where I discovered oil painting for the first time. It was a kind of magic. It was like photography—totally flat—but looked three-dimensional. After the show, I asked my mother to buy me an oil-painting set—the cheapest one! I started by myself at home without a teacher and began to look through books about oil painting where I found Picasso, van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and all the masters. My brother would bring home books and records from the TV company he worked at. I came across Pop art and thought it was so shocking. I also came across silk screening, photography and other forms that weren’t painting. It was a big discovery. I thought if that is art I want to do it!
They called it ‘New Painting’, which was a global term for a new expressionism and it referred to artists like Schnabel and Basquiat. It was a big invasion to Asia. I remember in the 1970s painting was so old-fashioned. People in Japan were looking to the West, to America. They didn’t care about Japanese art. It had been a really traditional mentality.
Basically because there was no space in Tokyo! I had decided for my next show that I would make some three-dimensional works but it was an obscure idea and I didn’t know what materials to use. When I visited, a man working in a shipyard asked me if there were any sites I would like to see, referring to the beautiful nature or landscape. And I said, ‘I would like to see the trash of the ship yard.’ He gave me two ships. That was a big lure for moving because I couldn’t bring that material back to Tokyo. The wooden ships were so beautiful. I cut them into pieces and reconstructed them. It was my first sculpture. I rented a huge factory space in the mountain and I planned on staying a couple of years to make these sculptures. It wasn’t easy, it was very isolated. No one there knew or cared about art. Many people in Tokyo told me not to go and said that it would be really bad—they said I’d be finished. I had already done two or three shows in Tokyo and one in London and they said that would be the end of me. I knew it was a really big thing to move but I didn’t care. I thought if I disappear that’s it but I knew that if my work had power then people would come from New York or London—that was a delusion but it did happen finally! It only took 30 years! [Laughs]
I simply select what I like or I dislike. For me the scrapbook is kind of a field for experimentation. There are no rules and I can do anything. I do it when I like to do it. The scrapbook has to be fun; that’s really important. It’s difficult to talk about the concept for my scrapbooks. I know in the contemporary art world the message is important, but not necessarily for everything. If I could explain it, I wouldn’t paint. Ten years ago, I would make these absolutely huge books and one took me five years to complete. Now I don’t care about the pages or the size, but I must continue.
When I feel that I am almost done, I start to make a new book. So the ending period becomes the beginning period of the next one.
I think everyone has their own map and the map has many layers; it’s an accumulation of time. Finding the map inside and trying to see the inner landscape is really similar to making things. Making work is how I can look at this world.
I like music and my brother was a huge influence. I can remember so much Japanese and American pop because my brother would buy three singles and play them over a hundred times each. I like listening to good music but I never wanted to be a musician because I never wanted to make a melody. I wanted to take on a more experimental, original approach. Making a track with instruments and a melody had already been done and others have done it much better than me—it’s the same idea with my art, I want to be original. There’s a strong relationship between art and music.
Traditionally, painting means using paint. But for me, making sculpture is a similar approach to painting. The feeling is the same. I don’t know how it works for other people, but drawing is the basis of my practice. I am not interested in artists who make good work but cannot draw. It’s my own rule: Artists have to draw. Artists have to be able to express their ideas using only pencil and paper.
I don’t know any other artists. I don’t like the art world! (Laughs) I don’t have any artist friends. I have friends who are designers, editors, musicians but not artists.
I’ve been asked so many times about that Hockney episode. When people write about me they always focus on Hockney—Hockney and me! But at that time, it was about discovering. Tokyo was so conservative. It was really austere and had a bad feeling. Everyone was so negative and critical. I hated the Japanese contemporary art world.
Printmaking is a really interesting subject. I started doing silk screens and etchings when I was in high school and I haven’t done it for over 20 years. I came across Ken Tyler in the mid-1970s through books and knew that he was strongly connected to this institution. He has worked with Hockney, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and many others. In 1978, when Hockney was at the Ken Tyler studio, he created these amazing paper pulp works. I was really interested in that technique, which is really hard to do.
I had no idea. If I don’t know the technique, I can’t plan what I will do. The works I have created here came out of experimentation. I have made a huge book using silk screening, which will be sent back to Japan and next year I will start to bind it and make the cover. Three years ago, I went to documenta and then made the work in Japan before I sent it. It depended on what material I could find in Kassel. That book was really hard to make, it was around 200 or 300 kilograms. This book will be at least 200 kilograms.
It’s not an art thing … but I have wanted to make a bar for a long time. Everything has to be totally original and I will make the chairs and tables and tiles. I don’t want it to be a cool or arty bar, but somewhere I can play my records. —[O]
Artist Profile Shinro Ohtake Born in Tokyo in 1955, Shinro Ohtake is one of Japan’s leading contemporary artists. He first emerged with a breakout solo show in 1982 at Watari Gallery, which represented international artists including Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was the first Japanese artist to have a solo show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Through his noise band JUKE/19 (1978-82), Ohtake helped influence the direction of experimental music in Japan, particularly noticeable in the work of Yamataka EYE from the Boredoms, with whom Ohtake later collaborated in the music and art group Puzzle Punks. Ohtake’s works function as studies of materiality, form and process. They
include drawings, collages and paintings as well as large-scale assemblage pieces that draw from the detritus of daily life, the urban environment and underground music culture.
Begun in 1977, Ohtake’s ongoing series of “Scrap Books” forms the core of his practice. Ohtake has made more than 64 unique books to date, ranging between 50
and 882 pages. Ohtake works on each book for several months to over a year, pasting found imagery and materials into fragmentary compositions on each page,
and then adding hand-drawn and painted elements. The books take on sculptural yet organic properties.
Shinro Ohtake began working with Take Ninagawa in 2008, when he had a three-part solo exhibition at the gallery that ran from May to October. He has had recent mid-career surveys at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2006) and the Fukuoka Art Museum (2007, toured to Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art). His work is in numerous public and private collections in Japan including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Benesse House, Naoshima. International collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2009 he was included in “I Believe: Japanese Contemporary Art” at the Museum of
Modern Art, Toyama, and completed a site-specific commission for Benesse Art Site Naoshima, the Naoshima Bath “I♥湯”, and in 2010 he participates in
Gwangju Biennnale 2010.
Gallery STPI STPI is an internationally renowned space in Singapore for conceptual developments in contemporary art practice in print and paper. STPI's Creative Workshop offers a dynamic residency programme for leading artists from around the world to experiment and push the boundaries of artistic creation with alternative methods and materials. Together with STPI Gallery, its critically acclaimed programme and exceptional workshop expertise, make STPI one of the best international destinations for contemporary arts in Asia.
Exhibition STPIThis September, STPI Gallery presents Paper – Sight, the first solo exhibition in Singapore by Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake that marks the artist’s extraordinary endeavor in print and papermaking, showcasing some 30 of 140 unique and edition works executed at an incredible pace during his residency with the STPI Workshop in 2015. Highlights include a series of large-scale fluorescent paper pulp paintings—a technical feat for both Ohtake and STPI—as well as a 320-page sculptural scrapbook, consisting of 160 individual artworks, that parallel his ongoing Scrapbook series of 68 artist books spanning over nearly four decades.
'It was a brand-new challenge creating images using a ladle instead of a brush, but the expressive approaches derived from experimenting with a size I had never tried before in [papermaking] led to a big evolution for me. There was the possibility of realizing new ideas,' says Ohtake.
The prolific use of neon yellow coating is particularly striking in the gamut of juxtaposing colours and imagery. Referencing uranium ('yellowcake') and radiation, the acerbic colour emanates Ohtake’s preoccupation with a sense of life’s transience following the March 11th Great East Japan earthquake and Fukushima disasters in 2011. The works act as recordings of radioactive contamination and can be seen as a response to concerns it raised around nuclear energy, threats from nature, considerations of the earth and the universe, and relations between families and homes affected by the disaster.
Ohtake’s characteristic style and sensibility towards amassed content and 'pasted pictures' remain heavily apparent in the exhibition. Only this time, recurrent themes and familiar motifs of nature and found images culled from the artist’s daily life are appropriated in an amalgamation of new materials, techniques and multi-neon colour palettes, resulting in a bold and unapologetic body of work.
Deeply rooted in daily life, this exhibition harks back to basics of Ohtake’s practice, which is the process of collecting, chronicling and re-presenting the contents of life and time. Rather than suggesting a specific commentary or narrative, the process stems from the artist’s interest in the different strands of time embodied in each material, and it is this dense layering of multiple times existing in one moment that his works illustrate. For as Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, New York, and the 55th Venice Biennale (where Ohtake’s scrapbooks were displayed as part of The Encyclopedic Palace) described them, 'they are a reflection on the ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world.'
This exhibition is held in conjunction with SJ50, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Singapore-Japan diplomatic relations, and made possible with the generous support of our Friends of STPI.
