2023
installation, dimensions variable

Takahiro Iwasaki is a Japanese artist known for his large-scale wood installations built with great technical precision and his extremely delicate miniature sculptures and art environments. In this exhibition he creates small-scale buildings and ephemeral landscapes from black plastic everyday items, such as toothbrushes, plastic wrap, forks, spoons, straws, rubber bands, food trays, etc. His highly detailed works are sometimes recreations of historical architectural sites or reconstructions of modern Japanese skylines, with delicate construction cranes, Ferris wheels made of thread, and radio towers assembled from hair, alluding to the country’s extreme industrialisation.

His installations, constructed of seemingly randomly stacked elements, recall the modelled masses of mountains, seas or even cities; the cranes, buildings and objects give the illusion of continuous construction. His fragile landscapes of ephemeral, cheap, everyday materials are internationally known manifestations of events of global memory articulated in Japan, such as the nuclear disaster in Fukushima or the devastation caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the city where the artist still lives and works. He reconstructs realities on scales that we usually overlook, drawing our attention to distance and scale, questioning our fixed perceptions and awareness.

The artist’s installation is a contemporary diorama: it presents a landscape, a scene, an activity, a historical event. In one frozen moment, we see the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the artificial Black Sea, constructed entirely of black plastic, in three dimensions. The area around the nuclear power plant became a no-go zone after the massive tsunami, and still is, outside of time. Coloured plastic products made of black oil are commonplace objects around us, but they do not return to nature; they are also outside of time after use. Time has stopped for them; only their decaying debris remains for eternity.

In the background, the seemingly starry sky actually shows the logos of world companies as they represent the brightness of a world city, so these are not the distant bright stars of a night sky, but a night view of a metropolis. That of Tokyo, the energy-hungry city whose brightness keeps the sealed-off area of Fukushima in darkness.