Sangsangmadang Gallery

Kim Noam l Director of Gallery Sangsangmadang

SPEED

Tetsuya Nakamura’s works affected me a great deal when I visited the 2006 Shanghai Biennale held in Sep. 2006. To be exact, his works took a kind of romance out of my deep consciousness. This romance, in fact accords with a daydream I had in my childhood while watching the animation, ‘Mach Go Go Go (マッハGo Go Go)’. I had a fantasy that I could go anywhere in the world, even to the world of the unknown, riding a speedy race car.

Watching the characters in the Japanese animation take part in a breathtaking stock car race, I was filled with tension and excitement.  Among the characters, there were heroes, heroines, opponents, and other unknown helpers, which made for many complicated relationships. 

Mach Go Go Go (1967) was the first Japanese animation series to deal with motor racing since the production of Tatsunoko(龍の子) which adopted the Formula concept. The name of the main character is ‘Speed’, and his father’s name is happened to be ‘Pops’. Hence, Nakamura’s works provide viewers with a curious coincidence that crosses the boundary of time and space.

His works present the idea of speed, shown through surfaces and exterior forms.  Nakamura’s works do not have the auxiliary power of Mach Go Go Go’s jet-propelled equipment, but his work shows the elegance and flowing body of Formula racing, whose speed and power are reflected in the glossy surface of the vehicle.  In particular, the surface is especially charming. Its brilliance cannot help but catch the viewers’ eye.  Therefore, Nakamura’s work needs no special mechanism like Mach Go Go Go because its surface already reveals the nature of its reality.  The sole body is enough to satisfy the viewer. 

Tetsuya Nakamura is a representative Japanese pop artist. Although he has practiced traditional Japanese Lacquer, his works are still quite universal. They often describe mechanical forms and images as opposed to portraits.  Nakamura links speed with the colors and gloss of the smooth synthetic resins that make up the surfaces of his work.  His works also reference mechanical movement and orbit.  Other examples related to this concept include: the mobility and power (武力) of the ancient cavalrymen of the Mongol empire, the lightning war (blitzkrieg) performed by the German armored division in WWII, the energetic movement of American aircraft carriers (航母), the great Formula, displayed in fighter and motor races, and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Series.  All of these previous examples reveal remarkable speed and produce surrealistic images linked to this concept. Nakamura’s works remind us of both the vision of the 20^th century Italian ‘Futurists’ as well as the streamlined industrial design of the 1930’s in America, which represented Americans’ optimistic vision for the machine age and the extreme speed of the future.

Heroes and heroines, who deal with technological equipment in modern society, represent advanced civilization. The civilization and its formal characteristics, represented by machines and speed, become a common environment and experience for the residents of the Pop Kingdom.  Mechanical forms and substances are not merely the central elements of material civilization, but they become the essence of the civilization itself and represent a desire for endless speed.  One is forced to discern between the true nature of society and civilization and the characteristics of the modern world. 

Nakamura’s ‘Speed King’ works force us to deeply consider modern people and civilization as well as various discourses in contemporary art. He accelerates objects in images, creating imaginary speed, and links these to mechanical aesthetics.

FIRE 

It is difficult to gain a universal aesthetic sense or an insight into the existential condition of modern people by seeing Nakamura’s works alone.  Rather, by searching for his own unique style of formal elements and method of presentation, the artist reveals his own secret world to the viewer. 

One important element in his work is paint.  Before this exhibition, Nakamura gained recognition through a series of streamlined and super-high speed objects covered with the images of a flame.  This series describes the images of fire as well as the energy of fire, which reminds us of Gaston Bachelard’s vision of a flame.  Bachelard mediated between the scientific world and the poetic, artistic, and imaginary world while examining images of flame and fire.  It is there he found a link between these two worlds. 

Nakamura’s image of fire can be related to Bachelard’s vision of a flame.  Nakamura’s image is both archetypical and mythological, as he references the image of Prometheus and the contemporary myth of Formula.  Pushing his work to create new images and using new materials, he plays on the boundary of technology and fine art.  This can be compared to Bachelard, who believed that science does not necessarily equal objective knowledge and was interested in the effect and technique of scientific knowledge.

This exhibition focuses more on the concepts of speed and advancement rather than images of fire that Nakamura has shown in the past.  He excludes images of flames and stresses speed through the forms of monochromatic objects.  In this case, the single color creates a certain deepness that permeates the object’s surface.  Nakamura’s unique style of dark transparency and complete flatness also suggests an incredible deepness in the world, as Noi Sawaragi stated.  This creates an interesting paradox between infinite deepness and the complete flatness of the glossy surface. 

GLOSS OR AESTHETIC SURFACE 

Nakamura’s surfaces contain a certain power that crosses the boundary between the individual world of the artist and the world of contemporary art.  His glossy surfaces seem infinitely extending and invoke a power that cannot be completely controlled by the artist.  They present themselves as both the work of an individual as well as the result of the development of modern society. 

The world of contemporary art holds a number of interesting paradoxes. Modern artists often present their works under the premise of ‘everyday life’ and claim to pay close attention to the mundane aspects of normal life, but the images they create do not represent this original reality exactly, but a new reality, one that is interpreted and imitated by artists.  Thus, we cannot free ourselves from the ontological condition of modern artists and their discourse.  Nakamura’s images seem to stand on the mysterious boundary between these two realities. 

Nakamura achieves the quality of his surfaces through a long process of repetition, which one can describe as a metaphysical gloss.  The shine indicates the metaphor for the aesthetic of metaphysics and leads us to a profound deepness beyond any superficial shallowness.  As one critic previously stated, it is similar to the poetics of a mirror.  The power that exists in such a shallow surface leads us from the world of art and technology to the more obscure world of religion.  The wave of light found in a glossy surface can remind us of the aesthetics of light in the middle ages.  It can also remind us of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chair(flesh)’, which has both a surface and an interior. therefore It can be named a chair, but it is not all that different from human beings.

On one hand, Nakamura’s surfaces resist the mechanics and function of mechanical reproduction and reference a more aesthetic world apart from science and technology.  This world is not constrained by doctrine and is a world of continual creation and re-creation.

Nakamura’s images and objects also remind us of industrial design products like cars or airplanes.  Yet, his objects lack any real function and are created for the purpose of aesthetics alone.  Nakamura’s objects exist merely as a dense surface, acting as both an interior and exterior.  This seemingly impossible design indicates that Nakamura does not fit into the mold of 21^st century capitalistic society. His designs and images function as poetic metaphors that present themselves as mere aesthetic expressions. 

Nakamura believes that surfaces in general are strongly related to the aesthetic effects of gloss, where the brilliance of the surface can be connected to the aesthetics of medieval Christianity.  In art historical terms, medieval artisans, who combined a sincere faith with artistic technique, were able to express holy pictures of Christian icons through such glossy surfaces.  Specifically, the encounter of red, blue and gloss often represented Christ and the holy faith.  Traditionally, oil painting reigned supreme as the most respected form of artistic technique and expression in Western society.  This is perhaps due to the unique effects and surreal experiences that a glossy surface can create.  It is an experience related to the invisible world of man’s spirit.  Therefore, many artists, artisans, critics, and patrons alike have been deeply immersed in the aesthetic and religious effects of this kind of infinite gloss, which is able to bring an element of the surreal into the empirical world. 

The surface of an object is still a mysterious space even in the minds’ of those outside the system of Western modernism.  It is not merely about the surface itself, but the element of a secret construction which the surface suggests.  Nakamura’s surfaces open up a world where infinite experiences and interpretations are possible.  We can now discuss this in relation to a more advanced, modern world with the knowledge that this unique aesthetic surface was first discovered and utilized by medieval artists and artisans. 

EVOLUTION 

T. Adorno views the creation of art not as the creation of something new, but as the simple adjustment to what has already existed. As a result, the pre-empirical becomes present in the empirical.  Adorno’s viewpoint leads one to believe that we continually pull the pre-empirical to the sphere of the empirical through the practice of art.  This notion is linked to the idea that art evolves, an idea that originated in modern society.

The central features of Western modernity are the new and heterogeneous.  Modernity that is rooted in heterogeneity is bound to imitate the different.  The idea of rupturing this tradition is the central paradigm of contemporary art in the 20^th century.

If one accepts a taste for the new and seeks to cut the relationship with aesthetics of the past, the meaning of Pop Art comes to mind, as Pop Art appeared during a time when modernism was flourishing in the 1950’s.  Pop Art came to the surface along with a modern lifestyle, a globally extended economic system, and an ever-growing system of development.  Modernism helped Pop Art flourish, but even today we still are producers and consumers of Pop culture.  Although some may disagree, one could say that we cannot free ourselves from the world of Pop culture.  It can seem like it is the original world that we belong to.  Challenging this notion presents a new problem that can separate us from the great evolving movement of modernism. 

Nakamura’s idea of evolution is a profoundly closed concept, contained within the artist’s private world.  Therefore, his concept of evolution can be read not as a general idea, but as a nuance or metaphor, floating among groups of signifiers with different meanings.

Nakamura’s evolution is an aesthetic idea, which makes it more closely related to basic, common sense rather than logistics.  The sharing of simple experiences is a type of common sense, and in this same way, art has the mysterious power to allow people to share impossible and surreal experiences.  Therefore, the aesthetic mechanism is beyond the possibilities of formal communication and can pass over to the realm the un-communicated subject.  At this point, Nakamura’s idea of evolution moves from a scientific to an aesthetic concept and can be developed to the level of an archetypical mythology. 

In Nakamura’s world, art and design join together as one to encounter the machine.  Through this infiltration of these concepts he presents his own form of evolution.