nca | nichido contemporary art

Place：nca | nichido contemporary art
Date：4th October - 1st November 2008 Tue - Sat 11:00 - 19:00
Closed on Sun, Mon and National Holidays

Reception: 4th October 17:00 -19:00

nca | nichido contemporary art is pleased to represent the first solo exhibition of Masahito Koshinaka.
We will show 9 works of his new series, “double word” in this exhibition.

Following on from his earlier work "echoes", Masato Koshinaka's "double word" series has shifted from taking the human figure as its subject to looking at plants. In spite of this, Koshinaka says that the meaning of his work hasn't changed. The notions of "the group" and "the individual" have been the core themes of his work until now, and in this new series he focuses on the fact "that the individual makes up the group and yet there is a difference between whether that individual exists on the inside of a group or on the outside." The artist's introduction of time as an element in his work is an important point of note. Against a backdrop of Japanese irises, one (individual) flower's withering away is captured in a sequence of photographs and thus made into an artwork.
However, if that were all there is to the work, one could perhaps understand it solely as a photographic documentation of the changes of time. Certainly Koshinaka acknowledges photography's basic function as a means for documentation, but what he strives to master is rather photography as a medium that documents the kind of phenomena that cannot be distilled from regular information, or that cannot be expressed in words. It is in this approach that one can identify the reality he perceives in his mind.
That said, "reality" is but a single word, and what the artist has in mind no doubt has a more complex significance. This is suggested in the way that Koshinaka invariably uses the word "identity" when writing about his work. He detects a sense of reality in identity and documents it in his photography. Thus, the notion of identity that he seeks, and which cannot be rendered into language, seems to be hidden somewhere in the relationship between "the group" and "the individual".
The sense of identity we have when we are part of a group, or when we find ourselves alone, is not the same. When we find ourselves in a group, we are barely conscious of having an identity, whereas once we are alone, we feel it much more strongly. Speaking more specifically, when alone, people are very sensitive to the loss of their identity, conscious of how it might be compromised, and so they become fraught with anxiety about its loss. Identity is something that people take no notice of while they have it, but embark on quests to recover it as soon as they have lost it. In effect, our identities are merely alibis, a proof of our own absence. For human beings, identity preordains our eternal absence. The more we chase after it, the more it distances itself from us. Thus, if identity is simply a fundamental trait of our own absence, one cannot help but conclude that it will elude any explanation through language.
In light of all these issues, what does the "double" in the title mean? Consulting the dictionary brings up definitions relating to doubled quantity, doubled layering, doppelgangers and substitution. Flowers start off by being part of a group, but over time the group withers away and they become solitary a process of moving from the interior of a group to the exterior. Koshinaka's work is perhaps an overlaying of the interior and exterior of the group, or perhaps it is the straddling of the boundary line between life and death. Either way, like these Japanese irises, we allow our identities to become ambiguous and vague, and we live out our lives continually avoiding further investigation of the meaning of our identities.
I have written thus far, and come to realize that I am getting drawn too far into the world of language. Taking a fresh look at Koshinaka's new work, and I find his withering flowers to be captivating. His close up look at this subject matter is not beyond one's expectation. They show the brilliance of a moment in the life of an individual in decline. This imagery gives a sense of the richness of eros that the present can attribute to the finality of death that awaits us in the future.

Kentaro Ichihara (Art critic)