Texts
Essay
2005
Trevor Schoonmaker, curator, Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Taiyo Kimura (Kamakura, Japan, 1970) gravitates towards the oddities in everyday life. Using mundane materials such as milk cartons, food, magazines and stuffed animals, he creates objects and scenarios that speak to life’s comedy and inadequacy. His art does not imitate life, but gives us humorous, cartoonish renderings of modern society’s peculiarities. With a boyish craft and incisive wit, Kimura transforms the grotesque into hilarious and the ridiculous into charming. The result is a body of work that is as refreshing as it is perplexing.
In his video installation, Typical Japanese English (2005), Kimura hides his video within a basket of laundry. In order to see it, one has to bend down and dig through the pile of clothes, then peer through an open shirt to reveal a hidden monitor. There we find the artist performing a sequence of incomprehensible acts. He holds chopsticks with his eyes while trying to pick up tiny objects. A series of coins are dispensed from the artist’s mouth. A steak gets placed inside a washing machine. Kimura brushes the teeth of a fish, while the fish sticks out of his own mouth. The situations are almost familiar, but the details are all wrong. Together these vignettes point to the futility of life and find humor in our failure. In this case, Kimura himself is the victim as he humbly takes the brunt of his own jokes.
Kimura seems to value the audience’s interaction with his work as much as the object itself. In Black Hole (1995), for example, he engages the viewer through familiar visuals and disorienting sound. Tiny black earphones completely cover a stuffed teddy bear, emitting the noise of seventeen different radio stations all at the same time. Voices and music wash over one another until nothing is discernable or distinguishable. The white noise reminds us of the chaotic energy of Tokyo, while the bear embodies the “cute” aesthetic so familiar in Japanese popular culture. For the viewer, the experience is that of a manga comic come to life in 3-D form.
Comic influence is also evident in an Untitled sculptural work (1997-2005). A row of blue and white milk cartons appear to be a minimalist installation about formal beauty until one looks inside to find little people made of clay. As your eyes move from carton to carton the figures multiply like a 3-D claymation film until they are packed in like sardines. And then suddenly, in the next carton, everyone disappears. The sight of miniature people cramming themselves into an increasingly crowded milk carton speaks simultaneously to the blind following in group behavior and the ridiculousness of today’s society, where everything is commodified and consumed. Kimura’s use of humble materials like milk cartons and clay is one of his trademarks, and likewise a strength of the work, which makes his tragic comedy all the more digestible.
Kimura’s black humor is perhaps most palpable in Hatarake Hatarake (Work Work) (2005), a sculpture of two crawling babies made out of the hexagonal patches on soccer balls. The plush infants look innocent and cuddly, but their soccer ball construction creates an overwhelming urge to kick them across the room. It is this push and pull between the sweet and the naughty that makes Kimura’s work so appealing. In the end, it is the very oddness of his work that shows us how strange life really is.
Trevor Schoonmaker is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Hehas organized numerous exhibitions including The Magic City (2000), Propeller (2005), The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Futbol(2006), Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode(2007), and the international traveling exhibitions Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (2003-2005) and DTroit(2003-2004). He is the editor of Fela: From West Africa to WestBroadway (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Schoonmaker is currently organizing the traveling retrospective exhibition Barkley L.Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, at the Nasher Museum of Art (February2008).