遠足プロジェクトアジアは、コロナ禍のとても微妙で難しい状況の過去数カ月にわたって、地元のいくつかの学校にて展示およびにワークショップが開催されてきました。いよいよ「台湾国立海洋技術博物館」での展覧会が始まります。台湾でのアクティビティーを共同キュレーターとして引っ張ってきてくれたバンブーカーテンスタジオ：ハイジ・チェンさん、皆の支えとなって導いてくれているマーガレット・チューさん、それからプロジェクトの台湾入りから支えてくれたアイリス・ハンさん、台湾アーティストビレッジのキャサリーン・リーさん、今回の台湾から新規参加するアーティストの皆さん、博物館のスタッフとボランティアの皆さん、そして今までに一緒にやってきた参加アーティストと共同キュレーター、サポーターの皆様にこの場で（他に、これという機会が作れず、、、すみません）御礼申し上げます！！

People know of my praxis as someone who ‘paints large abstract sky and miniature realistic landscape hybrid paintings,’ ‘leads Japenase backpack Randoseru artwork project traveling in Asia and in Canada,’ ‘creates installation artwork using wastes and paint them in gold or yellow, or assembles hundreds of thousands of mosaic mirrors,’ ‘does intense performance artwork and directs a festival,’ ‘takes photographs of Lolita in Fukushima,’ ‘creates life size nude figurative paintings,’ ‘creates portraits of children and imitates their artwork following their playful production processes,’ and ‘paints angry women staring straight at you kinda portraits,”… and so on. They all seem to have different characteristics and people seldom think of them as I am out of focus or inconsistent. Yet each of them have quite long history and narrative that are quite distinctive and all deep have personal connection with me. Anyways, I hope my diverse praxis has finally made sense to the people as a single holistic approach on this website as a visible archival platform.

Thanks to designer Mr. A.J. for his work and kind guidance to manipulate the WordPress.

Artist Daisuke Takeya discusses his latest exhibition, ‘Breaking the Waves’ and its connection to disaster, recovery and remembrance of the 3.11 Tohoku disaster.

Daisuke Takeya brushed his hand gingerly along the matte black frame of his latest installation work.

Taking a step back, he looked contemplatively at the massive altarpiece mounted on Christopher Cutts Gallery’s eggshell white wall. Unfolded, the spectacle takes up two-thirds of the space, complete with movable panels of nude paintings, neon lights, and resin encrusted soil and debris elevated a few feet off the hardwood floor.

“Should be okay,” he said nervously. “But the wall can break, you know.”

Earlier, the Toronto-based performance artist had carefully swung the two moving panels back and forth while deciphering his showcase, Breaking the Waves, at the Toronto west end gallery. Unshaven and slightly haggard, he had spent the last five days assembling the exhibition and transporting artwork from his Scarborough studio. Putting together the final touches before the official opening the next day, he expressed his concern for the magnitude of the altarpiece, which weighs over 1000 pounds.

Takeya, however, is no stranger to moving large-scale installation pieces. Four years ago, his God Loves Japan installation, a 14-foot tall structure modelled after a typical Japanese-style house battered by the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami disaster, took up an entire section of the exhibition hall at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, (MOCA).

Breaking the Waves, he says, is a continuation of that work — bringing narrative to the continuing recovery efforts in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and commemorating the lives lost in the incident.

“I think narrative is quite important in my practice because I’m a painter,” Takeya says. “I think there’s some stories to tell and there’s something real [here] so it’s easier to get started.”

For the past five years Takeya has conducted numerous art projects, travelling exhibits, and workshops designed to aid locals in the Tohoku region, called the Daiichi Projects. The journey, he says, has transformed him from being an introspective painter working in the confines of his studio to a relief worker clearing debris in earthquake devastated zones. The experience has also led him to provide creative distractions and art workshops for the local children who have lost their houses, schools and playgrounds.

“The feeling I get when I go there, I think it’s better, much better,” he says. Having returned to various parts of Tohoku, year after year, he feels the population is on the mend, and more uplifted now than a few years ago. “I think the recovery, the reconstruction of the cityscape and the removals of debris have gone by and there’s no trace of how it was before. So every time I go back, it’s a new scenery, that’s good, but at the same time the memory is fading and I can sense that.”

The same transformation is evident in his signature large-scale landscape paintings called the Kara series that are also a part of the exhibition. In which the colour nuance and vastness of the sky are displayed prominently on the canvas, eclipsing the thin strip of cityscape below.

“The sky is big, so our civilization is small comparatively,” he explained the idea behind the juxtaposition. “So whatever problems and whatever matters to you in your life or with your loved ones are almost pointless, or nothing, or minimal.”

‘Kara’, is a play on words of the Japanese kanji for sky, ‘sora,’ which can mean emptiness when

The latest addition to the Kara series is an idyllic portrait of the Ishinomaki Okawa Elementary School, where the lives of more than 80 pupils and teachers were swept away with the tsunami. The slow response of the school staff to evacuate the students attributed to the high death toll, according to a recent municipal court ruling.

Takeya has meticulously recreated the scenery to include a bright yellow patch of blooming sunflowers on the west side of the school. Yet, hidden on the opposite side, behind the vacant school building sits a gray block representing the shrine for the dead etched in the corner like an indelible watermark.

“I want to bring in the works to see the changes, the transformation that took place in my practice after the disaster by doing various different kinds of projects,” Takeya explains the meaning behind Breaking the Waves, a title he had borrowed from the 1996 film of the same name by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier. The film follows a psychologically troubled woman who becomes a martyr for her physically disabled husband by throwing herself into sexual promiscuity. The latter recovered from his disability while the other sunk into the depth of irrevocable self-destruction.

“Recovery is part of the new waves. Things change. My practice, I have Kara series paintings, it’s sort of the style that defines me as an artist but then I’m doing different things, different projects and trying to reach out for society or social issues. So that’s like a new wave for me, so I’m breaking the waves.”

As an extension from his previous Tohoku earthquake related installation at MOCA, the altarpiece also captures the expansion of his artistic range. On the exterior panels, Takeya has re-used the neon signs, “yes” and “need” from God Loves Japan. Here “need” is flashing red and surrounded by soil, water and debris he retrieved from Tohoku and coated with a layer of resin to resemble the muck covering the grounds of the tsunami-devastated areas. The adjacent panel is laden with Japanese toys he had painted black, and buried beneath hardened insulation foams adorned by dollops of coloured paint. It’s open to interpretation what the signs mean, he says, but they’ve survived both installations while other parts were lost.

“I wanted to make it an altarpiece because I’m interested in duality,” Takeya says. “I think everything good has some bad and bad has good too, and everything has both sides.”

To contrast the material objects on the exterior panels, the inner side of the altarpiece contains a nude painting of Governor General’s Award winning performance artist, Istvan Kantor, shouting through a megaphone. Takeya has taken the liberty of placing Kantor, known for his disruptive, visceral and graphic art performances, within a barricade of wreckage as colloquial symbolism of a “disaster within a disaster”. To his right, a life-size painting of a naked young woman lies on her bed, exposed and vulnerable, with toys for little boys scattered all around her as well as the shoes from the other side of the panel floating in a circle. In her hand she clutches the same postcard of a boat that has been partially buried by the soil on the outside panel.

“Maybe she got swallowed,” Takeya suggested, as he points to the middle painting showing nothing but a sea of white. “This is the tsunami coming, connecting these two, so they may be at different places and different times but they are connected somehow.”

Among other works on display at the gallery, Takeya included a whimsical painting of electronic pop artist Clara Venice, as a purple-haired mermaid riding the world’s biggest squid. Its deliberately garish and vibrant backdrop distracts from a bleeding turtle in the foreground that references a famous YouTube video about plastic waste.

There is also a portrait of Alice from his Fukushima NO ALICE project, parodying Francisco Goya’s The White Duchess painting, looking wistfully onward as the black tsunami waves rises in the distance.

“I think artists need to be aware of the context – the culture of context – why is it so important?” Takeya says, as he ponders the idea of doing another series that can connect Toronto audience to the earthquake disaster.

“Obviously the artists who would have created the artwork, they are important for them, but not necessary for people in the communities. So I’m trying to make the issue relevant here but that’s not the only reason I’m doing this. I think I very much enjoy painting and creating art, exhibiting and communicating through artwork too, so somehow at the moment my practice is balanced.”

Breaking the Waves exhibit will run from Dec. 8 to Jan. 7 at the Christopher Cutts Gallery.

Friday, January 27, 2017

Earlier this month, I participated in the closing reception of Daisuke Takeya’s exhibition of paintings and installation at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. 

Daisuke is a Canadian-Japanese artist who works both in Toronto and Tokyo. He calls himself an “interdisciplinary artist whose practice is comprised of the exploration of nature and plausibility in contemporary society, and hinges on all kinds of double meanings.” He has lived and worked globally, having studied art in New York.

His exhibition at the Cutts Gallery titled ‘Breaking the Waves’ was his fourth solo show. The title is from Lars von Trier’s 1996 film of the same name, which depicted a traumatic story of love, life and death. Daisuke explained that the film had resonated with him and influenced his artistic explorations especially after the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear reactor meltdown disaster of 2011 that hit Japan’s east coast. 

Earlier, talking to me during an interview on TAG TV (which is yet to be aired), Daisuke said that as an artist he evolved dramatically from realistic and figurative paintings to exploring emptiness after his five-year involvement for the rehabilitation of the survivors of that disaster.

In interpreting emptiness, Daisuke uses large canvas space to depict the sky, and at the bottom of the canvas is a thin, minuscule skyline of different cities. 

The Kara (emptiness) series of paintings force viewers to see urban space as a small, insignificant, and quintessentially artificial creation of humankind, dwarfed by the vastness of nature’s immense creation – the magnificent sky. 

The urban skyline depicted are of Toronto, Niagara Falls, rural Fukushima, the South China Sea, Jomon, the oldest known civilization of Japan; Gaylang, Singapore’s redlight district and Okawa Elementary School.

The Kara series were exhibited in one room of the Cutts Gallery. In the other room there were two life-sized paintings: a portrait of a Lolita girl from Fukushima, and of a Canadian indie music star Clara Venice as a mermaid.

Both exuded a distinct surreal aura, not necessarily in the way they are painted (realism) but in the way Daisuke situates and contextualises them. 

The overwhelming effect they created in the exhibition space, juxtaposed as they were with the centrepiece of the exhibition, was dramatic and unsettling, and ultimately surreal.

These two paintings along with the centrepiece installation formed a part of a triptych monument dedicated to the 2011 tsunami disaster in Japan.  The installation was a smorgasbord of abstraction, realism, mixing of different media, a combination of disaster debris, neon signs, Kara paintings and figurative, realistic (as opposed to sensual) nudes. 

It boldly proclaimed the underlying theme of the exhibition: that manipulation of nature in the name of development and progress only results in decay, disintegration; and that all of it is almost always deliberately. 

The highlight of the closing reception was a performance by Istvan Kantor, who performed the ‘Ravaged Pieta’ in the installation space, blending in with Daisuke’s art and simultaneously transforming it. 

Kantor is a renowned exponent of Neoism and a Governor General Award winner for performing art. He interpreted tsunami to mean gentrification that has led to the extinction of urban communities in recent decades. His cry was also against what he describes as ‘shinyism’ of art that is controlled by corporate tastes. 

The highlight of the performance was at the climax when Kantor pushed a needle into his vein and began to bleed rather profusely much to the gaping astonishment of the audience. It was by all accounts a spellbinding act.

From the social media, I learnt that Ravaged Pieta was a mash-up performance led by Kantor, and accompanied by Lynda Cheng – Vocal/Performance, Louise Liliefeldt -Performance/Tableau Vivant, Vivienne Wilder – Music Performance. 

Louise Liliefeldt is a longtime collaborator of Kantor, and is globally known for her pioneering durational tableau vivant action/performances and installation works. Vivienne Wilder is a skilled musician/artist, lead vocalist and bass player in several bands. She has become integral to Kantor’s performances in recent years. Lynda Cheng is a social worker with unceasing passion for helping homeless people. She also contributes her talents to the arts and regularly shares the stage with Kantor. 

Daisuke Takeya’s new installation, God Loves Japan, reaches to MoCCA’s ceiling: the approximate height, in some residential areas, of the tsunami that dominoed the devastation of the artist’s country of birth last spring. The catastrophic connotation of the scale is deliberate but inexact (the average crest was actually much taller); Takeya is not so didactic. The installation is not so sinister. It is not sublime; it doesn’t overwhelm with horror. Instead, it takes the shape of a devastating force, and makes it accessible.

The work is explicitly interactive, with a playhouse structure at its heart. Wooden stairs invite audience ascent into a small space filled with objects and photos. There’s also a flashing sign, a kiddie slide, and a sandbox. A toddler was playing in it when I visited, on Valentine’s day; the circumstances felt ideal for experiencing a piece so thoroughly rooted in whimsy and innocence, so overtly focused on love, and so obviously conscious of that stereotypically Japanese aesthetic of the cute. But is it appropriate to respond to disaster so fancifully?

Yes, because Takeya’s rhetoric – neither cynical nor naïve – is as critical as it is hopeful. Not only does the work comprise all the unknowns of the audiences who traverse it, it’s filled with fluctuations that emphasize the artist’s discomfort with absolutes and his commitment to dialogue. The installation is built on a shifting series of inversions and unsettlings.

Beginning with the exhibit name, which is itself a flip of Douglas Coupland’s novel, “God Hates Japan”. Claiming that “God Loves Japan,” Takeya spins divine feeling more happily – and then makes the pronouncement alternate with a pragmatic injunction for human audiences: “Go Visit Japan”. Viewers who proceed up the stairs then encounter the idealistic lyric “Love is all you need” blinking on a screen beside an unflinching “Maybe”. The conversation’s final word is found by peering through a hole beneath a rubble of magazines onto a scripted “Yes” buried in the structure.

Yes, then – Takeya seems to assert – love is all you need. But the affirmation is obscured. It’s complicated; this ‘yes’ is a direct art world reference to Yoko Ono’s ceiling painting, which Takeya has reversed by making the spectator peer down onto, rather than climb up towards. The qualifications multiply in considering the implication of the famous – and then tragic – love story that Takeya evokes by placing Lennon’s lyric so close to the Ono reference.

Takeya’s installation bridges art and activism carefully: it doesn’t exploit disaster for aesthetics and it doesn’t reduce art to prescription. God Loves Japan inspires both care and critical thought. And the title’s a misnomer: the work is not about God, but people, and is not an observation, but an appeal.

Heather White is a freelance writer, independent curator, and professional dabbler in the arts. Holding a BA in Contemporary Studies and History (University of King’s College, Halifax) and an MA in Philosophy and the Arts (SUNY Stonybrook at Manhattan), she currently lives and works in Toronto.

Fake flowers poke out of another backpack. A plush tiger’s head covers a third. On a fourth, there’s a mirror. Inside a fifth, an art set and painted landscapes.

A sixth has a Google Earth image of Onagawa, the site of a nuclear power plant that withstood the 2011 tsunami that struck Japan, despite being closest to the earthquake’s epicentre. With it, a question: “Where are you now on the globe?” with a GPS locator, compass and binoculars.

The backpacks are among dozens that Takeya invited 70 artists from Japan and Canada to decorate as part of a cultural exchange and exhibition honouring the relief efforts related to the tsunami. Field Trip Project, as the exchange has been named, has already travelled to 20 destinations across Japan.

The take-away message is up to visitors.

“You might take something away about environmental studies, disaster preparation, design. It can be anything,” said Takaya, who organized the show with Onagawa-based art teacher Chie Kajiwara.

Takeya, a Japanese curator now living in Toronto, said he came up with the idea after visiting Japan in the wake of the disaster. He was already organizing disaster-relief activities from Toronto, but thought he could do more by travelling to Japan.

He drove through the country, giving workshops to kids. In the coastal town of Onagawa, Takeya found a gymnasium, which was being used as a collection centre for donations. In the gym, hundreds of surplus backpacks were piled high.

Donations exceeded need, but there wasn’t enough manpower to sort through the excess.

“It ended up occupying a big space and not being touched for a year,” he said.

So Takeya came up with an idea for an art project that could spread a message of optimism.

“We will need to carry on, rebuild and recover,” he said.

Each artist began with the same style of backpack, since the backpacks are part of the uniform for elementary school students in Japan.

Takeya gave artists only three parameters. The backpacks shouldn’t be too fragile, because the exhibition would travel. They shouldn’t be too heavy, because audience members should be able to try them on. And they should be created with a tone of optimism, instead of bringing people down.

“Each artist has different interpretations of the disaster. Some are poetic, some mechanical, some reference Japanese pop culture,” Takeya said.

In addition to the 70 original artists, eight British Columbia artists and four local school groups were invited to design backpacks.

One class each from Christ Church Cathedral School, Campus View Elementary, Cloverdale Traditional School and Tillicum Elementary has a backpack in the exhibition.

The Maritime Museum of B.C. is the project’s second stop in Canada, following the Canadian debut at Idea Exchange Design at Riverside, in Cambridge, Ont.

The backpacks will be on display until Sept. 8.

Executive director Jon Irwin said the exhibition fits with the maritime museum’s other tsunami-related activities, which have included shoreline debris cleanups.

“It’s a beautiful exhibition,” he said. “And it connects Japan with Vancouver Island in highlighting the effects of the tsunami. It’s a happy story for a very tragic event.”

​
HERE’S how it all started. Among the food, clothing, and blankets sent in as relief supplies to that tsunami disaster area were randoseru backpacks for the children victims. For everyone’s information, randoserus are firm-sided backpacks made of either stitched firm leather or synthetic leather used in Japan by elementary school children. Randoserus are given to Japanese children upon their entry into grade school, and, traditionally, each child is expected to wear the same firm-sided backpack until Grade Six.”At the end of March in 2012, a year after the disaster,” wrote Takeya in the project catalog, “large amounts of relief supplies were still filling up local school gymnasiums as surplus and were soon to be discarded.” Takeya was referring to a period when the idea struck him to use the backpacks as material for the trauma release art workshops, noting that the backpacks are “a metaphor for affection, learning and childhood memories” in Japan. He then later thought of commissioning Canadian and Japanese artists to transform the surplus backpacks into artworks, thereafter bringing back these transformed pieces into the disaster areas to connect them with the original interactive trauma-release art program. Pretty soon, after a two-week first exhibition of these backpacks at the Onagawa temporary housing (Onagawa was one of the municipalities most heavily damaged by the tsunami), a show curated by the survivor children of the municipality themselves, the backpacks traveled Japan without Takeya’s having planned it to become a traveling exhibition. It simply saw itself starting to travel from the perspective of Takeya’s need to expose “the difficulty of balancing support from outside with actual local needs.” Using the exhibition as a vehicle, it seemed to Takeya then that “two-way communication was an absolute necessity.” And so the backpacks traveled to about twenty destinations in Japan. Takeya also noted that, soon afterwards, instead of “having serious in-depth conversations about the disaster” around the backpacks as conversation pieces, “we shared unique local issues at each destination.” Now, wearing “the artworks gave people a chance to share memories, and we had rather light, and possibly sustainable, introductory dialogues about environmental and natural disasters.” Here is what interests me about this. Should artworks really be themselves, as in the Structuralist ideal or in the l’art pour l’art utopia? Or can artworks be both perfect as themselves as well as vehicles for further conversation on topics near the intent of the artmaking and even topics far removed from the springboard? But to continue our narrative, it was at the height of these backpacks’ touring of Japan that Boquiren got wind of the phenomenal randoseru traveling show, which tickled her curiosity and interest as a member of an East Asia study group at the university where she teaches art history (University of Asia and the Pacific) and as once a short-term creative industries management course participant in Keio University as well as being once a Baguio-raised kid who now remembers her childhood with the pasiking and as a survivor of the 1990 Luzon earthquake. She contacted Takeya through her curator friends and broached to the artist the possibility of bringing the traveling show to the Philippines. It turned out that Takeya had a similar invitation to bring the show to Singapore.

Performed on Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 at Toronto’s Gallery 345 with: Erin Cooper Gay, soprano & horn, Lynn Kuo, violin, and Erika Crinó, piano

Through the music of Handel, Ravel, Brahms, and Szymanowski, Les AMIS’ artists explored the intimacy of the human spirit and its encounters with nature and special guest, visual artist Daisuke Takeya, joined the artists on stage to create a magical evening of visual and musical poetry.

A native of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, violinist Lynn Kuo has appeared as soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician across Canada, United States, Wales, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. As guest soloist, she has performed with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, Thirteen Strings (Ottawa), Canadian Sinfonietta, Brandon Chamber Players, Nexus percussion ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Bulgaria), Cantus Ensemble (Croatia), Lviv Philharmonic (Ukraine), and as special guest soloist with Hungary’s gypsy orchestra, Rajkó Band.

In demand as an interpreter of new music, Lynn has given numerous world premieres of acoustic and electroacoustic solo and chamber works written for her and various ensembles. International composers have included Constantine Caravassilis, Daniel Foley, Scott Godin, James Harley, Alice Ho, John Oliver, Dennis Patrick, Michael Pepa (six works), Elizabeth Raum, Avalon Rusk (Canada), Séan Clancy (Ireland), Katarina Miljković (Serbia/USA), and Viktorija Ćop (Croatia). Most recently in 2012, Lynn, joined by Marianna Humetska, piano; Anna Guo, yangqin; and Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings (directed by Kevin Mallon), gave the world premiere of ‘Si Yi – The Four Arts,’ a commissioned work by Alice Ho for violin, piano, yangqin, and string orchestra.

Lynn continues to collaborate with leading artists, having performed solo and chamber works with such artists as pianist/conductor Christoph Eschenbach at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival (Germany), the Gryphon Trio at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Lori Freedman (clarinet) at the soundaXis Festival (Toronto), cellist Winona Zelenka, Vancouver guitarist/composer, John Oliver (as Duo Vita), pianist William Aide, and with other eminent artists at the University of Toronto New Music Festival, and Music Biennale Zagreb Festival (Croatia).

Maintaining a busy performance schedule, Lynn also performs as leader of Toronto’s Les AMIS Ensemble and has led the Ensemble in four past European tours. Her performances have since been broadcast on Canadian, Serbian, and Hungarian television and radio. In 2010, Lynn recorded the music of Nino Rota with pianist Mary Kenedi for the NAXOS recording label, to be released in 2013. With Ukrainian Canadian pianist Marianna Humetska, Lynn also performs as Duo Les AMIS, who will be recording their debut CD, ‘LOVE: Innocence, Obsession, Passion’, in 2012-13 with the assistance of FACTOR. Based in Toronto, Lynn is the Assistant Concertmaster of the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, in addition to performing with the Canadian Opera Company, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Lynn has also performed as guest concertmaster of orchestras that have included the National Arts Centre Orchestra and has also served as adjudicator, guest artist, teacher, and lecturer at Canadian festivals and universities. Lynn completed her Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Toronto dedicating her research to the subject of holistic health and injury prevention in orchestral string musicians.

www.lynnkuo.com

At first, looking at this work, which was boldly presented just inside the entrance to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, Canada, it is as though the tsunami had just happened. It is a shrine to its devastation on a human scale. There are stairs leading up to a small room with the chaos of actual tsunami debris littering the floor and walls of the space and from inside it we can look out onto the rest of the work which is covered with debris from the tsunami. The respectful sensitivity in how children’s toys are displayed in this work adds to the overall emotional impact of this exhibit. There are a series of small showcases beside the stairs which have household items inside them on display. Small paper cranes which symbolize peace are above each showcase. Japanese magazines and books are scattered all over the floor, along with children’s toys and the clutter of small manufactured objects for human use. It gives a feeling that all of this manufactured stuff for throwaway use is just as temporary as human life itself. Perhaps it is easy to think of ourselves as permanent and important but how insignificant we are when we are faced with the indifferent power of the natural world. Its sudden changes we often interpret as violent indifference. There is also a sense that much of our consumable daily life stuff and occupations are trivial.

The coming to an end of the economic bubble and the end to such economic wealth in Japan where its economy threatened to be the world’s largest were followed by several murderous doomsday cults and natural disasters. It seemed to have reached a peak with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and may give the impression that “God hates Japan”.  In spite of all of these difficult situations to overcome there is a constant revitalizing spirit in us as humans to overcome adversity even when it seems relentless. The outpouring of global emergency aid both technical and material for Japan after the tsunami was remarkable as was the Japanese character for recovery. It may make us think; perhaps Japan is not so hated after all.

Question:  Why did you do this art installation piece?

Daisuke Takeya [DT]: To raise awareness of Japan’s and other devastated areas around the globe’s long term needs of support, and to prevent a forgetting of this and other similar tragedies.

Q:  How did the tsunami affect you?

DT:  I was, by chance, awake in Toronto when the earthquake and tsunami happened. The striking live images coming in on TV and the Internet reminded me of 9.11 (I used to go to a graduate school in walking distance from the Twin Towers), and it made me want to act in a humanitarian way, rather than just being traumatized. I immediately organized a relief fundraiser ASHITA: Artists for Japanon March 29, 2011 to raise funds and awareness for Japan’s immediate needs. Artists from visual and media arts, music, dance, performance, and literature contributed their works.  Over 600 people attended and the event raised over 10,000 dollars. My sincere gratitude to all Canadians who have been supportive.

Q:  How difficult was it for you when you first visited the affected areas?

DT:  I was speechless. The whole scenery was just like a Hollywood movie set. It was hard for me to imagine that civilization was there just months ago. I felt that the recovery process would take years. I thought of what I could do to support, instead of focusing on my difficult feelings. I created a long-term recovery project based on children’s perspectives (because they will be the last witness of the incident after few decades) and travelled across four of the prefectures devastated by the tsunami, conducting children’s art workshop in temporary housings, orphanages, and community centres.

Q:  The use of actual objects from the tsunami is kind of haunting. How did you get the materials into Canada?

DT:  I put them in my suitcases respectfully.

Q:  There seems to be a widespread opinion in Japan and abroad that the Japanese government has downplayed the severity of the radiation crisis. What do you think of this?

DT:  Instead of thinking much of what has already happened, I think a lot about what needs to take place to get the healthy environment. The current political structure did not function fast enough, so I may suggest that Japan should look into the importance of provincial governments like in Canada.

Q:  Do you think many of those who have been severely affected have been forgotten by those who could help?

DT: Yes. People away from the area do not think and talk much about the incident anymore. [There are] so many issues all around the globe. Perhaps it is natural. My installation challenges this.

Q: What do you think about the Japanese government’s position in terms of possibly withholding information on the seriousness of the nuclear disaster from the public?

DT: I personally think it is insincere. Perhaps the current government has its agenda to fast forward and export the nuclear energy technology, and discussions on this can cause delays.

Q: What do you see in the character of the people who have survived the tsunami?

DT: Their continuing resilience is inspiring as is the resilience of so many in other cultures, places and times. This makes so many people respond to the healing power of art.

I am optimistic about the recovery of the disaster affected areas, however the situation has not changed since three years ago and it seems it has a long way to go.

親愛なるクローン、

あのさ。日本人でいるというのはもしかしたらいいことなのかもしれない。それにね、僕は君と一緒でいられて、幸せだし、誇りに思うよ。そして君も、僕と一緒でいられて、幸せで、誇りに思ってくれるといいな。

君の友人として、敬意を表するよ。

GOD LOVES JAPAN is a time-sensitive installation memorializing the earthquake/tsunami disaster that took place in eastern Japan on March 11th, 2011. The installation intends to raise awareness of Japan’s long-term recovery needs and encourages viewers to re-evaluate the meaning of love and empathy in our time.

This installation includes three works:

1. A neon sign work, All you need is love Maybe; 
2. A deconstructed video recording sculpture Everybody Loves You 2 (ELV2);
3. and Yes, an homage to Yoko Ono’s 1966 work CEILING PAINTING (YES PAINTING).

The title of the exhibition is Takeya’s personal response to Douglas Coupland’s 2001 book GOD Hates Japan, the story of characters lost in a malaise that swept Japanese culture after the collapse of their economy in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In addition it illustrates the way some of these characters lived in the shadow of the 1995 sarin-gas assault on Tokyo’s subway system by Aum Shinrikyo, a religious death cult.

On March 11th, 2011, an earthquake/tsunami disaster devastated Japan’s east coast.  So perhaps Coupland is right, that God does indeed hate Japan and that the recent disaster merely reinforces his point that human (and divine?) indifference reigns.

GOD LOVES JAPAN aims to make the incident relevant by being a metaphor for how values that are shrugged away today with cynicism, such as ‘love’ and ‘care’, can be rebuilt and strengthened over time. By commemorating the one-year anniversary of the disaster in Japan, the exhibition aims to call attention to the still-ongoing recovery, hoping to strengthen international solidarity and to build bridges for future partnerships between peoples all over the world.

The installation includes signage with ‘All you need is love Maybe’, an ambiguous statement in red and white neon, with ‘All you need is love’ flashing in red neon, and ‘Maybe’ in unblinking white. This work seeks to question our responses the statement, asserting the Heisenberg Principle, that uncertainty is the only certainty.

These words invite the viewer to consider their personal responses to Everybody Loves You2 (ELY2), an interactive sculpture and video-installation composed of non-functioning debris collected by the artist after the 2011 tsunami/earthquake on Japan’s east coast. Functioning as a hybrid video-making booth and confessional, viewers are encouraged to interact with the installation and be recorded saying the phrase “I love you,” a phrase that has become a cliché through public discourse and mythic associations. Through this simulation of a stereotypical behaviour, viewers actively construct and deconstruct their aesthetic experience of everyday reality. The words “I love you” become a declaration of confession to a subject who is absent, questioning the notions of authenticity and reality. In addition, ELY2 is inspired by trends in internet communication (eg. Facebook, MySpace), and the Japanese youth-culture phenomenon of the print-club photo-booth. It transforms our physical experience with these media and questions replacement of spatial and social interaction with I.T. culture. This work in its earliest “functioning” form first premiered during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2007, curated by Michelle Jacques and exhibited at Xpace Cultural Centre in 2010.

Love survives. ELY2 evolves as a result of this interaction and integration, developing a relationship over time with viewers and the environment. By situating the dysfunctional, or deconstructed work as a victim in the recent earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan, the sculptural structure of ELV2 will appear as though love is dead (and GOD Hates Japan). However the audience will hear the voices of people whispering, “ I love you,” in a video loop, remnants of love merely being simulated.

Finally, viewers will be guided towards a hole located on the elevated area of the installation. Upon looking into the hole viewers will see a little sign saying “Yes” (YES). The work is surrounded by photographs of Takeya’s Facebook friends that are currently volunteering in the disaster areas of Japan. Yes suggests optimism and the audience peeping downward may appear to be humanitarian rescuers. The work is homage to Yoko Ono’s 1966 installation that inspired John Lennon, and perhaps what lead him to his idealistic hit song, All You Need Is Love, through her influence.

Daisuke Takeya pointed toward a spot on the floor. Inside his closet-sized wooden shack, the floorboards are strewn with a carpet of old toys, wrinkled books and magazines. The narrow space, with the roof hanging a little over six-feet tall, are scattered with everyday household items: an alarm clock, a dial-up phone, a television set with the words ‘all you need is love, maybe’ across the black screen. There’s even a plastic goggle.

“Can you look in it?” he asked. You can only do that on all fours.

Through the lens, a spot of bright light shines through a dark hole. Somewhere in the pile of sand and trash beneath the floor is a white neon sign that reads: “Yes”.

“When you are looking at it, you look like one of the rescuers,” Takeya says.

It’s a welcoming sign –- not all hope is lost.

When Toronto-based JC artist, Daisuke Takeya, traveled through the earthquake and tsunami-devastated regions of Tohoku, Japan, late last year, hope was sparse among a population deprived of their homes, livelihoods, and the prospect of life ever returning to “normal”. For three weeks, Takeya slept in his car and conducted arts workshops for children in temporary housings and orphanages. He realized then what it means to ‘never lose hope’: “the kids are so happy,” he says. “I know they have some trauma deep inside, but they are happy and still want to have fun.”

Perhaps the silver lining here and hidden within Takeya’s latest installation, God Loves Japan, is that our situation is what we make of it. Which might also explain the many subliminal signs and messages the artist planted throughout the 14-feet tall wreckage he constructed to symbolize a typical Japanese house in the aftermath of the tsunami.

The entire work is divided into three levels. Up top, the walls of the wooden shack are plastered with photographs of volunteers in the disaster relief efforts. Below, is a playground surrounded disorienting arrays of random scraps, clothing, luggage and shoes. On the ground floor is a broken heart sculpture lying on its side –- recycled from Takeya’s 2007 Nuit Blanche booth “Everybody Loves You 2” –- playing previous video recordings of people saying ‘I love you’ from the nook of its woofer.

Nearby, the adjacent white wall has been partially painted black to the height of the tsunami wave that struck Tohoku’s coast –- 10 feet, exactly. It would’ve submerged two-thirds of the display underwater. “I want to recreate height of the house where the audience can actually come up and experience it,” Takeya says. “It’s different from [what you see on] YouTube. By actually come upstairs and be in a Japanese house, the Canadian audience can feel ‘wow, the water came up this high?’”

With the approaching anniversary of the March 11 earthquake, Takeya hopes his title –- a reference to Douglas Coupland’s 2001 book God Hates Japan –- can raise the much-needed support and awareness from among the Canadian public. The author threw in his personal recommendation for the use of the title as well.

“He (Coupland) said that it’s a great idea to use this title ‘God Loves Japan’ versus God Hates Japan and what if god loves Japan? This wouldn’t have happened right?” Takeya says. Ultimately, he leaves it to the audience to decide if the same love survived the destruction.

But can a country now in a state reminiscent of “lost decade” Coupland fictionalized in his book find reasons to hope in the long, drawn-out recovery? As Takeya sees it, the future’s prime with possibilities: “To be honest … there’s not so much Japan can feel optimistic about. Everything is in decline. But we artists are really trying to understand and contextualize the reality and imagine and make it into different forms to encourage people. So I think now’s the greatest time for artists to lead a nation in need.”

I remember buying 2 works of Marcel Dzama at Olga Korper Gallery in 2001. They were my first Canadian art collections. He had his first solo show in Toronto and also was on the cover of NOW Magazine. I had my Canadian solo debut show at Christopher Cutts Gallery at the same time … Olga Korper and Christopher Cutts sit on the same gallery complex on Morrow Avenue. As a matter of fact our invitation card was printed on the same matrix by the same printer. His show was sold out and mine wasn’t. But when I see the proof nicely framed and hung in my apartment, my work is no lesser to Dzama’s. Having critical works by artists I like inspires and motivates me!

For now I call the collection, “Le Petite Canadian Art Collection” = because it is a modest collection of small scale artworks (and a deli in my building is called Le Petite Gourmet!!).

Whimsy collection it is for now. Let’s see how it grows:)

As we approach the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake/tsunami in Japan, Daisuke Takeya’s latest installation, GOD LOVES JAPAN, keeps the memories of that time top of mind.  His exhibit runs until April 1st, 2012, at MOCCA (952 Queen Street West, at Ossington).

This Japanese-born/New York-trained Toronto resident artist has been working very hard in the past year to keep the events of 3/11 in public consciousness, here and abroad. As a performer in Toronto To Japan’s ‘Hope Blossoms’, Daisuke’s commitment to ensuring his art is relevant to what is now the reconstruction efforts in Japan has found another outlet with this emotionally powerful installation. It is interactive (you walk through the devastated ‘house’ in the installation), playful (a slide to finish off your journey), with a deep sense of loss in every sequence. The installation has an overwhelming effect on the senses.

The title of the work is a subversive response to Douglas Coupland’s novel, “God Hates Japan”, about a morally-drifting Japanese man who finds himself living in the shadow  of a death cult’s 1995 sarin-gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system.

“My installation,” says Takeya, “mirrors what Coupland did.” Coupland was a visitor in Japan, trying to fit into an foreign culture whilst observing what he saw.  Conversely, continues Takeya, “I am a Japanese artist living in Canada observing its people and working toward a meaningful dialogue with them about what took place in foreign soil.” Takeya takes a nuanced approach to art and activism; both seem to quietly cross-examine the other in respectful tones. What is left is the clamor of voices of those who were swept away by the tsunami.

“People so easily forget,” Takeya says thoughtfully, before a triumphant note enters his voice. “But the victims don’t want to be forgotten.”

GOD LOVES JAPAN is one of the most engaging acts of memory in, well, recent memory.

Born in South Korea and raised in Canada since 1975, Sang Kim is a playwright living in Toronto, Canada. His first play, Ballad Of A Karaoke Cowboy, was published in a University Of Toronto literary magazine in 1992. It is currently being re-issued in book form in August 2007. His play, A Dream Called Laundry, about the life of a ‘comfort woman’ living in Toronto, was published in 2006. A staged reading of A Dream Called Laundry was performed during the “Toronto Reads Festival” in February 2007. He has been profiled in the Toronto Star (Joe Fiorito); the Globe and Mail (Ken Wiwa); National Post (Jacob Richler) and has made appearances on a variety of television networks, including Rogers TV and Sun TV.

Originally conceived and conducted in 1999 by Sheila Heti. To learn what artists think about how they work and discover what contemporary artists share.

1. Name: Daisuke Takeya
2. Medium: Anything that elementary school children would use in their art classes + oil paints (if they don’t use it in their class).
3. Process: Contemplate, create, analyze, contemplate, create, analyze, contemplate, create, analyze… the process means as much as the finished product, because my practice is self-couseling, healing, and meditative.
4. Aesthetic: Something possibly 6 year olds and 90 year olds can enjoy. Something that people in Masai Mara in Kenya, Tibet, Yellow Knife, and Hong Kong can enjoy.
5. Aesthetic horror: Not sure…
6. At which point in your process you are cheating / a fraud: I am not cheating/a fraud… or everyone is. Every creation is inspired by something. Modern technology and the IT revolution changed the way we work drastically… Things that are called cheating/a fraud can be an “of course” thing in the future…
7. The elements by which you judge your work: Artistic excellence, care, time spent, thoughts went through.
8. The basic unit of your work: Love and caring.
9. Which trends in [your medium] are the death of [your medium]: Nothing is new. No death in my lifetime.
10. What you have borrowed from whom: Children. Japanese pop. Japanese poetry. Abstract Expressionism. Baroque and Renaissance. Action Painting. Various art genres. Various music genres. Various film Genres.
11. What is completely your own: Nothing but everything. No one else on earth would have created my art but my work is based on everything I have experienced each day.
12. The most astonishing thing you have seen today: Gray sky.

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Sheila Heti works as Interviews Editor at The Believer, and has contributed long interviews with writers and artists to the magazine.

She is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books); the novella, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); How Should a Person Be? (Henry Holt); and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney’s McMullins) featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of “conversational philosophy” called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber), which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011.

Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Vietnamese and Serbian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, McSweeney’s, Brick, Geist, Maisonneuve, Triple Canopy, Bookforum, and other places.

In 2001, she created the Trampoline Hall lecture series, at which people deliver lectures on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The shows have been running monthly in Toronto since that time and have sold out every show since their inception.

In 2008, she created The Metaphysical Poll, a blog that collected the sleeping dreams people were having about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries. The blog received hundreds of dreams and press in The Washington Post, The LA Times, New York Magazine, Slate, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

She appeared in photographs as Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton’s book-as-auction catalogue, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry.

She appears in Margaux Williamson’s film Teenager Hamlet, and with her runs The Production Front, which puts on shows and promotes the work of other artists.

She is working on an adaptation of the I Ching, a novel about love and consciousness, a book about our relationship to objects, and a book-length interview with a certain psychoanalyst.

She studied playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. She lives in Toronto.

author Sheila Heti’s home page

After returning to Japan, when the subject of holding an exhibition in the Roppongi Hills Club came up, I immediately suggested Daisuke’s work. I gazed out of the windows of this club on the 51st floor of Roppongi Hills and saw the expansive sky and the Tokyo skyline. It seemed to me that if his sky series were exhibited there, they would create a kind of affinity with the location, a site specific feeling.

We ended up receiving several works from him on loan and exhibited them for about a year. The second half of the exhibition included a Tokyo cityscape with Roppongi, which linked the exhibition even more closely to its site.

His skies are vast. His canvases are mostly sky. There is a city vividly rendered along the bottom edge.   The look of the sky varies from work to work. There is something extremely mechanical and cool about it. Any city in the world could be painted in this style. Each work captures the subtle peculiarities of atmospheric light. Sometimes it is the strong transparent blue of a clear autumn sky, or the fleeting brilliance of the sky turning purple at dusk, and other times, the starry sky and the reflection of the city lights.   Viewers can probably identify which skylines belong to Tokyo, Osaka or Yokohama.   What they all have in common is a somewhat dry, but decidedly contemporary sentiment that savours nature while lamenting its seasonal changes and knows life to be a series of fleeting, singular encounters.

In particular, since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March, love of nature cannot be taken so simply. To love nature also means accepting its unfathomable power and all of its overwhelming presence, phenomena and will. At the same time, it means knowing our smallness and the bitter-sweet transience of our existence. Painting the sky that changes with each passing moment is an act born out of a reverence for nature that strives continuously, but impossibly to fix and capture its beauty. The tiny buildings under the sky communicate the diminutiveness and weakness of humans. It is a romanticism that harbors a sense of the evanescence of life.   Within the extremely minimal expression of his work, there lie many diverse and contradictory perspectives and meanings.

English translation by Sarah Allen

It is impossible within the limited framework of this talk to adequately address all of the threads and media which encompass the artist’s practise, and I won’t attempt to do it here.  Instead, I would like to apply conventional art historical method to a close analysis of some of Takeya’s paintings over the last 15 years.  This examination will deal with how the artist’s concerns as a young man were given form within the idiom of his academic figurative art training in the early 1990s.  I will trace the artist’s evolving engagement with the figure and the landscape as signifiers of feeling and desire to arrive at the current body of work.

* * *

“Kara” in Japanese means “empty.”  Its Kanji character also represents the word for sky, air, and space (“Sora”).  Both “Kara,” and “Sora” hover above Toronto and Tokyo, as well as Ottawa, Osaka and the village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland.  It is one thing that all these places have in common.  The “emptiness” or the “sky” of the Kara series of paintings can be seen to have its origins as far back as some of the artist’s early student work, where the inclusion of horizons into the backgrounds of figure studies and later as pendants to figure studies come to represent both a rhetorical and literal “emptiness.”

In the mid 1990s, Takeya was a student at the New York Academy of Art, an art school dedicated exclusively to the study of the human figure in painting, sculpture and drawing.  The study of the human figure has its roots in classical Greek art and in its Roman imitators, where the gods and goddesses of Olympus were rendered as beautiful and heroic humans wearing little or no clothing.  The revival of interest in classical mythology and art during the Italian Renaissance stimulated a return to illustrating mythologies and histories with the naked figure and learning the skill required to render the nude convincingly became one of the pillars of the academic teaching of art.

The study of the human figure meant originally learning anatomy from skeletons and cadavers.  In  the modern era photographs are an important source for visual information about the body.  But most often the study of the human figure is accomplished through that staple of art school – the life drawing class.  In life drawing class, a model disrobes and strikes a pose for a predetermined length of time.  The model usually stands, sits or reclines on a low riser, surrounded by students at easels or with drawing pads.  Depending on the point of the class, the model may start out with quick gestural poses, and then settle into one or two extended poses.  To render a “finished” figure composition convincingly from life (e.g. without recourse to photography) the model must remain in the same pose for hours or in sittings that extend over days.  The pose must be something that can be held reasonably still – no extended and raised limbs, or difficult and uncomfortable positions that cause the model to move and adjust position frequently.  The job of modelling is not for fidgety people.  If a person is capable of relaxing into a state of torpor they will probably make a good model and the artist will not have to constantly readjust the perspective and recast shadows.  The good model is a paragon of inactivity.  The good model does nothing.  Just stands, sits or lies there.

Initially, working from the model is a transgressive experience.  After all, how often do we sit in a room with a naked stranger?  But the unsettling nature of this situation soon gives way to the various and complex challenges of rendering accurately the perspective and proportion of the human anatomy.  Combined with the study of proportion, the repetition of the practise of drawing from the model in poses of extended duration produces artists who are adept at a naturalistic representation of the human body.

The reality of this practise of learning to draw from the figure, however, has had the inevitable effect of characterizing what we know of as figurative art.  It gives us a disproportionately large number of images of a relatively narrow range of human activity and attitudes.  Typically subjects recline or  sit, are apparently thoughtful or vacant, sexually available or enervated and despairing because, that is what life models do best.  Figurative painting can provide us with models of action, but these images are heavily dependent on photography and always betray the conventions of the lens.  Painting and drawing from the figure then relies on a stationary and relaxed model and, as a convention, it tends to idealizes passivity, isolation and vulnerability.

Looking at Takeya’s early figurative work, one can see that the landscapes and environments in which he has placed his figures underscore the apparent enervation and lassitude of his models.   Paintings such as Abandon, 1993, oil on linen, 81.5 x 43″; and Dead End Street, 1994, oil on linen, 80 x 55″ feature the juxtaposition of the naked figure with vacant, despoiled and dark city scapes.  These paintings don’t create believable spaces as much as they describe to us symbolic and psychological states of mind.  In Abandon, the reclining figure’s legs are supported by what looks to be a pile of junk.  Further examination closer to the bottom of the canvas reveals random objects that one might find in an artist’s studio, piled high, occupying almost 90% of the canvas.  Above and beyond the pile of junk, is a city scape – the silhouettes of a few tall buildings against a light sky, and above that a dark low lying cloud.  In Dead End Street, a model standing in the classic contraposto position with head bowed is surrounded by road and highway barriers, a dust pan, a fire extinguisher, and a welding mask among other objects.  A yellow line passes below the triangular police barrier, directing our line of vision to a horizon which is marked by a checkered yellow “Dead End” sign.  The dark low- hanging cloud and the pile of junk, the “Dead End” sign, and the various street barriers, all work to signify a mood of pessimism and despair, a mood which already seems to be illustrated by the demeanor of the model.

In this early work, one is able to identify a youthful alienation expressed in the language of figurative and landscape painting – enervated figures and the bleak city scapes are symbolic rendering of the artist’s own feelings.  Takeya characterized his mood at this time as being “happy to be sad.”  On the threshold of adulthood, his experience of life was coloured by a pessimism born of a personal loss and an isolation that was accentuated by the experience of studying in a foreign country, in a language and in a culture that he was just beginning to understand.

A series of diptychs produced by the artist in the late 90s (Untitled, 1999, charcoal on paper, 56 x 40.5″; Pornography, 1999, oil on linen, 64 x 88″; Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47″; Eternal Flame, 1999, oil on wood panel, 32 x 47″), contrasts, in the right hand panel, figures in various states of repose to, in the left panel, city, sea or landscapes familiar to the artist which are comprised of 80 to 95% sky.  The right hand panels, many of which were based on life modelling sessions, are, like Abandon and Dead End Street, rendered again in moody, dark environments that create a general feeling of languor, aimlessness or despair.  Like the earlier student paintings, each figure is cloaked in shadows and revealed only by the raking light of a single source – a light bulb, a television sometimes, but most often from what appears to be a window.  One can imagine that the left hand panel may be the view outside that space, through the window perhaps, or again, psychologically speaking, a symbolization of the figure’s emotional landscape.  Takeya has told me that the landscape images are of of Japanese places.  Todaiji Temple in Untitled, Yokohama City in Eternal Flame,  Yokosuka City in Pornography.  After the gloomy cityscapes which complete the backgrounds of the earlier paintings, the big skies of the diptychs may seem bright and airy by comparison.  But on further examination these big skies are overcast, or dusky or just bleakly empty.  Perhaps the dark foreboding and pessimism of the earlier work has cleared up some, and become something a more manageable nostaligia, a little less heavy, and maybe the beginning of something new.

In the series of diptychs Everybody Loves You, done while he was still living in New York, Takeya continues the contrast between a big-skied landscape on the left and a figurative representation on the right.  By this time, however, the figure studies have become somewhat uniform head and shoulder portraits lit by a single low frontal light.  Recalling his earlier work where the figures were cloaked in shadow, the position of the light in the Everybody Loves You portraits illuminates the tip of the nose, cheekbones, and the brow, and casts heavy shadows on the rest of the head, including the bridge of the nose and the sides and top of the head.  The effect, which is similar to holding a flashlight to your chin while standing in the dark, can be quite theatrical.  It exaggerates contours, focuses attention on the eyes, diminishes the hair and surface quality of the skin, and in doing so de-emphasizes gender.  The effect has been used in the cinema to allude to demonic possession or to an evil alter ego that may emerge after dark.  But it is also associated with a type of campfire intimacy – the shared experience of being in the dark with others and the bonding in the face of uncertainty which that brings.

In other words, Takeya’s choice of lighting may be ideal for the complex topic of speaking of love, de-emphasizing gender and bringing into relief our conflicted identities and often awkward relations with friends, acquaintances and the objects of our affections.  Moreover, the expression of affection, which is possibly more freely given in the United States than in Japan or even among the famously reticent Canadians, is none-the-less, universally problematic, and no amount of world travelling relieves the individual from this personal accounting: Do you or don’t you (love me), do you mean what you say (when you say “I love you”) and do you say what you feel (when you say “I love you”).

Perhaps this ambivalence is emphasized by the left hand panel cityscapes of the New York skyline as seen from Brooklyn.  Few other skylines are as recognizable as the New York City skyline, and yet, as Takeya renders it under towering skies, he makes it seem quite ordinary, diminished in comparison to the infinite sky above, suggesting perhaps that like the famous skyline, the words “I love you,” may be just another banal social construction in the grand scheme of things.  In Everybody Loves You the moodiness of the early figurative paintings and diptychs has been stripped down into a complex ambivalence.  The anonymous and quiescent nudes have morphed into individuals with names – seemingly self aware and capable of action, but perhaps also with self-identities and beliefs as insubstantial and as unformed as the sky above.

From being “happy to be sad” in the years immediately following his arrival in North America,  Takeya adapted emotionally and philosophically to his new home.  In his painting he pared down the conventionalized figurative representations of sadness and despair into existential mug-shot like portraits and flat, almost featureless landscapes expressing neither happiness or sadness, but a heavy, pervasive spiritual emptiness.

The Kara series of paintings retains and enlarges the city scape with the big sky and altogether  dispenses with its figurative pendant.  No longer are we asked to consider the symbolic despair of the slouched model, or the identity of the flashlight-illuminated individuals.  No longer does the landscape act as an exclamation mark for these figures.  Depicting the skies over a number of cities and towns in Japan and Canada, each of the canvases of the Kara series measures 6 feet in height.  The city scapes in each painting occupy less than 2 per cent of the paintings’ vertical height – a proportion of sky to land even more dramatic than in the earlier work.  If you watch the reactions of viewers, the natural inclination is to approach each painting in a slight crouch, in an attempt to identify the depicted city scape.  Once a landmark is identified and thus the city too, the spectator feels able to stand up straight and back up from the painting to take it in whole.

In the Kara series, questions of identity have shifted from individuals to cities and towns, but perhaps, like the head and shoulder’s portraits of Everybody Loves You which, after a time begin to seem less and less dissimilar, so too seem the cities of Osaka, Tokyo, Toronto and Ottawa when juxtaposed to the vastness of the sky above.  The radical perspective of Takeya’s view of the cities which he visited and lived in, reminds one of looking at the earth from space, where countries and ethnicities and borders are invisible. When asked about the feelings behind these images, the artist responded, “I wanted to feel like air.”

The Kara series was originally painted in 2001 and 2002.  Those paintings were tragically destroyed, and the current series of paintings is a recreation of the original, five years later.  The discipline required to re-paint the entire series is a testament to the personal significance the works held for the artist.  When asked about the inevitable difference between the paintings of five years ago and the contemporary recreations, the artist responded by saying that the current series is more colourful.  This is not hard imagine when we look at the tonality of the city scape panels of the preceding Everybody Loves You series.  In Kara, the sequel, Takeya’s work has opened up.  The skies begin to be less leaden and more airy.  A general greyness has given way to a luminous spectral range of colour ranging from sky blue to indigo, to pink and to orange.  Emptiness, or Kara, at one time a burden for the Daisuke Takeya, has become a space of possibility.

Performed on Saturday, September 10 2011, at Bianca’s, St. John’s, NewFoundland and Labrador, Canada

Live painting with cellist Vernon Regehr, accompanying the opening of “No. w. here,” an exhibition of landscape paintings at James Baird Gallery.

A native of Winnipeg, Vernon Regehr has performed across Canada and the United States, having made numerous festival appearances including the University of Victoria, Artspring (BC), First Avenue Chamber Players (New York), the SoundaXis New Music festival (Toronto) Hilton Beach (ON) and the Chamber Music Societies of Quebec and Kitchener-Waterloo.  Regehr is a founding member of the Cardinal Points Ensemble, having recently appeared at the International Festival of Ensembles in St. Petersburg Russia.  Of a performance of Elliott Carter’s sonata at the Groundswell new music festival in Winnipeg, one reviewer said that his playing‘…showed a clear understanding of the work, while handling its hefty technical demands with finesse.’  As a member of the faculty at the Tuckamore chamber music festival in Newfoundland, he has performed with Mark Fewer, James Campbell, the Shanghai and Lafayette string quartets, soprano Suzie Leblanc, and has been broadcast nationally on CBC radio in performances of commissioned works by Katarina Curcin and Jocelyn Morlock. He is also a founding member of the Ora Ensemble, which specializes in the fusion of new music, visual art and performance theatre.  Vernon served as guest principal cellist of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra for a concert tour featuring internationally renowned soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, with concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Boston, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. He is currently on faculty at Memorial University’s School of Music, and will be releasing a solo record of 21st century works by Canadian composers at the end of this year.