Naruki Oshima - Press release
Exhibition: Naruki Oshima Reflections
Opening reception : Friday, November 10, 2006, 7 to 10 pm
Duration: November 11 – December 22, 2006
Naruki Oshima was born in Osaka (Japan) in 1963. He studied at the art academy in Osaka and in the art academy in Duesseldorf, Germany, in the class of Thomas Ruff . Oshima won various awards and grants and his works where shown in galleries and museums in Japan and Europe.
The "Reflections" series by Naruki Oshima shows works of photography which seem to return to the same places time and again, that is to the surface of the picture via the glass surfaces typical of modern architecture. Nevertheless, their relocation should not be grasped in a tangible, local sense, but rather what we are witnessing is the return to a topos, to a picture. Pictures which, although their titles include names of places - e.g. Düsseldorf Airport - cannot be linked to an accurate definition and would seem to refer us to their true function, that of reflecting.
The image constructed is hence recognized by the observer as a structure that reflects and plays with light, and thanks to the connection to modern architecture it can also be understood as an image of how cultural reality is constructed. Once the observer becomes aware of this structure, he will be able to understand the reflecting surfaces of these photographs' subjects as a modifiable proposal, as a historically changeable position and no longer as the unalterable, ontological circumstances of reality.
This seems to shift Naruki Oshima's work into the conceptual vicinity of the theory of the Information Society, its fundamental tendency being (by contrast to the Industrial Society) the belief that reality is generated via information. In this type of constellation, the world can only be experienced, as Jean Baudrillard put it, as radically "unoriginal", i.e. by conveying it through pictures. Baudrillard denotes this stance with the concept of "hyperrealism", since this is where what is real ceases to exist, at the point where the classical forms of reflection, providing a likeness of reality, can no longer be distinguished from reality itself. The observer reads the signs as simulacrums, which he now deems to be real. In this situation, the distinction between reality and simulacrum, or to speak in the language of photographs, between inside and outside, or between reflection and what is reflected, becomes pointless. Thus, Naruki Oshima operates with "hyperreal" surfaces, whose power of simulation he reflects on and makes evident by virtue of a structure that reflects and plays with light.
Naruki Oshima intervenes manipulatively into this "as if" situation by altering the colors of some objects in order to make perspectives unclear and thus transform the picture into a sort of layering of planes, each transparent to a different extent, or by partially advancing an ever so slightly dyed, transparent plane, with the purpose of enhancing the visibility and/or the reflection and the distortion of the picture's genuine theme.
The work compiled here links metropolitan or urban situations, such as Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Osaka, with transitory places such as airports - in this case those in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt - and through its language of imagery illustrates the disconcerting discrepancy between entity and sign. The observer must classify them in a system of meaning, within which he cannot always decide what is inside and what is outside, where borders become blurred in a mixture of planes of reflection and light. In this flow of reflecting images, pictures operate on the surface, i.e. they are called upon to replace a plethora of relations to other representations and thus to other available cultural images! Reality, images, fiction and structure are on equal footing with one another in these works and hence cross the threshold to a new visual order. Naruki Oshima proposes a fragile order made of ephemeral reflections and a precarious structure of transparent planes, which multiply and break, which shine through and onto others - and always draw the observer into what he observing.
Text: Dr. Stefanie KreuzerK21 Art Collection
