Texts
Real Utopia – Stories of the Unlimited
Catalogue p.13, 2006, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, ISBN 4-903205-06-1
Daisuke Murata, curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
In many of Taiyo Kimura’s works, common materials such as 1 liter milk packs, black trash bags, rattan linen baskets that you would see often in this country are used. He also handles foods such as seasonings, snacks, curry, tomato cans, and meat that people consume and discharge daily. For example, in “Video as Drawing”, an image of a person washing his face with curry is played repeatedly. In “About the Japanese”, mayonnaise, ketchup, and sauce blends before the viewer. This gives the viewer a kind of undeniably strong antipathy and nausea. The physical antipathy and unpleasantness are in the same category as the sense of discomfort the viewer will feel by the sound of clock hands meeting and frictioning in “Friction/Where is a Lavatory?”, or the variant radio sounds released from multiple earphones at the same time in “Black Hole”.
The physical unpleasantness and sense of discomfort the viewer feels from his works lead to examination of humans institutionalizing and domesticating their own bodies in today’s society, and also point out the complicated relation between individual and mass. For “We know you know we know your pleasure you never know”, about 600 pigeons are placed all over the gallery floor. Each pigeon is handmade by the artist himself. The viewer is to slide over the pigeons a box with a frame and only a bottom plate attached to it or a box with an umbrella on it. The pigeons on the floor have wheels on their heads, so when the box is pushed it glides over the flock. The viewer sometimes needs to walk through the pigeons on the floor to pull back the box. The act of rolling a box-over pigeons with wheels on their heads and bodies painted in dusky gray has its eeriness. In addition, the various elements such as an umbrella that people need yet they forget and sometimes even cast behind or throw away, the irregularly arranged pigeons under the umbrella, and the human as the viewer all speak of group mind, relation between individual and mass, and human consciousness and unconsciousness.
Kimura puts down on his drawing books the physical discomforts, eeriness, and other unusual experiences he has in his daily life. For instance, he wrote down the experience of having his pants pocket getting hooked to the doorknob. He also writes in his note his imaginations and sudden random thoughts. The world written and drawn in Kimura’ s drawing book and his artworks speak calmly of possibilities of another world or a real nature of humans existing in any small experience or sense. He confirms the true nature of humankind and sense of reality by drawing his experiences and imaginations and through creation