Seeking some quiet moment in the busy streets of Shibuya, I sneaked a peak at the “Maji-Yabai – Fuckin’ brilliant!!” exhibition at Tokyo Wonder Site. Most striking for me at this collaborative project (featuring British and Japanese designers) was the incredible dedication and almost masochistic manual work of 4 of the artists.
Daisuke Nagaoka, Tree, Tryptich
Daisuke Nagaoka, Tree, Detail
Let’s start with “Tree” from Daisuke Nagaoka, a rather big ink drawing. Look at this detail, the way he moves his pen in tiny waves and strokes to create fantastic, mysterious animals and nature elements.
Another astonishing handicrafts-piece comes from Kiera Bennett. This tiny collage called “Fountain” consists of layers and layers of tidily cropped color-bits which – in the end – show familiar motives in a “painting by numbers” esthetic.
Chikara Matsumoto made an installation: in some kind of wodden van, one could sit (carefully) on a tiny bench around a tiny table with a small TV, on wich her animation “Heavy Metal” was running.
Chikara Matsumoto, Installation
Chikara Matsumoto, Installation
The walls of the van were wallpapered with pencil drawings: every single frame of her animation to touch and feel.
This, however was even topped by Kazuhito Sahara, who needed more than 4 big folders to expose his over 3000 sheets of acryl painted storyboards for his movie “Phantom Train”.
Now then – what does this tell us?
In a world, where nothing seems more natural, than to use computers for repetitive tasks, for rendering movies for… anything, my immediate reaction was: why did they bother to make all that by hand? Are they a bunch of masochistic artists hating computers???
Talking to Kazuhito Sahara for a bit, it seems like I was wrong…
“Chikara Matsumoto, Daisuke Nagaoka and I have been working together for about 3 years. Maybe we developed a similar work in that way, that we all do handdrawn animation, and we do use the computer for making the final movie. Daisuke is a bit masochistic, I admit, but talking about me: I am a painter and simply came to the point where I wanted my paintings to move. Keeping things handdrawn might simply be the wish to keep the love and human touch in my works.”
Handmade – Love – Human touch…
Strange for me to see, that the “original way” of making things seemed so far off.
Written by Uleshka