Mori Art Museum... (Part II)

10:46 a.m.

10/05/19 - Of our visit to Mori Art Museum's permanent collection, we have selected three works to post here. The first one is an installation done with wood and ceramics that represents the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games, but in the cat world. The artist is Takekawa Nobuaki and the museum explains that the artwork seeks a social denunciation, specially towards those trying to cover up discrimination. The large-scale installation has 1300 cats, gathered for the Opening Ceremony, in rejection to the effort to hide the huge Political excitement on Japan 2020 Olympics. The use of cats is only due to the death of the artist's dear pet, a loss he could not overcome.

Cat Olympics: Opening Ceremony, by Takekawa Nobuaki (2019)

Material: ceramics, wood

The second piece is “Contact” from the group Mé (Kojin Haruka, Minamigawa Kenji & Masui Hirofumi), founded in 2012. According to one of the members, the artwork is based in our impressions of the ocean, such as the way we feel towards the waves or the water itself. We are to grasp this pretend mass of water as if it were a landscape. But "Contact" affect our senses and causes vertigo, because it looks so real that we feel it will start moving as a rough sea. However "Under the Wave of Kanagawa", Hokusai's popular print, also seems to have influenced the artists.

Contact, by Mé (2019)

Mixed media

Finally, Tsuda Michiko created an installation that works with our presence, in a clear reference to Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking Glass”. Several cameras shoot us as we move around and suddenly we find ourselves reflected on the mirrors, even if we are not standing right in front of them, .The game goes on and on, as we seek our images in the different mirrors. It's easy to participate, but it's hard to explain and even harder to show in photos. This is a very well-achieved distortion that bends all the rules of reflection, quite like Lewis Carroll's story.