Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations & Tabaimo: ODORO ODORO

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Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations & Tabaimo: ODORO ODORO

by John McGee

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The Wind, 2002, 14 min 20sec, DVD installation
for three projections with sound (Photo: Crystal Eye Ltd., Helsinki; 
Courtesy the artist and Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Inc, New York)

For better or worse, video is becoming the medium of choice for many artists. On the positive side of that equation, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery is holding dual solo exhibitions by two women—one Finnish, one Japanese—born nearly a generation apart. 

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, 43, and Tabaimo, 27, both employ surrealism and fantasy in their three-screen installations. Ahtila’s pair of short, narrative DVD films focuses on intense psychological states in two unstable women. Tabaimo’s pair of quirky, hand-drawn video animations comments on contemporary Japanese social ills. 

Ahtila makes it clear this is no movie theater. She hangs colored fabric on the walls to create an all-encompassing environment, places soft lights behind the screens to give them a sculptural quality, and frequently breaks the panoramic continuity of images across the three screens into separate close-ups. 

Tabaimo, Japanese Bathhouse—Gents,
2000, 7min, video installation for three
projections with sound 
(Courtesy the artist) 

Both of her stories are based on interviews with mentally ill patients. The Wind (2002) features Susanna, a pissed off, slightly pudgy young blonde woman in a dingy, disheveled apartment. Scowling at the camera, she tells us, “I don’t feel anger and melancholy but I am anger and melancholy.” Injustices and frustrations howling through her mind cause her to gnaw her hands in rage, she says. She churns through her home, crashing a bookcase to the floor and crushing ceramic-ware underfoot. Visitors who appear—three teenage girls and a man who irons her newspapers—are little more than phantoms inhabiting hostile memories. In the end, she walks up a wall and sits on her haunches like a gargoyle, peering over her destroyed landscape. 

The House (2002) adds a dollop of schizophrenia to this supernatural suburban psychosis. Alone in her country house, Elisa hangs heavy black curtains to shut out invading sounds and delusions. 

Tabaimo wowed visitors to the 2001 Yokohama Triennale with a six-screen animated train car in which lumpy hand-drawn figures inhabit a world of vibrant Ukiyo-e colors. Here, her characters play-act humorous scenes of social change and environmental degradation in the community (symbolized as a sento or public bathhouse) and family (a Japanese house). 

Three angled projection screens and a sloped wooden floor studded with yellow buckets create a virtual sento, Japanese Bathhouse—Gents (2000). Inter-titles introduce short chapters like “Gents Bathhouse Deregulated.” A couple of salarymen—still wearing suits—soak in the bath. As one wipes sweat from his neck with his handkerchief, a string of naked women climb over the wall dividing their side from the men’s and plop in with them.

Some things get better (gender equality), others worse. A garbage truck arrives, dumping bags of trash into the tub. Then a cop enters and shoots the obasan running the place. 

Tabaimo, Japanese Interior, 2002, 
interactive video installation for three
projections with sound
(Courtesy the artist) 

In the interactive Japanese Interior (2002), visitors use a foot controller and a rat-shaped computer mouse to navigate through a house, opening doors to reveal animation clips recycled from earlier works. In the bathroom, a schoolboy pulls off endless layers of skin trying to find himself. In the toilet, a sailor suit girl lifts up her skirt and squats out a hinomaru (Japanese flag). 

Many original Tabaimo drawings are also on view, as are a series of photo diptychs Ahtila produced in relation to her films.

Separately, the Terada Collection upstairs features Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) on the theme of spring. Project N has paintings by Chiharu Nishizawa showing groups of anonymous salarymen performing meaningless activities.

This exhibition was held Mar-Apr 2003 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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