Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Tsukasa Yokozawa: Post Map

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Tsukasa Yokozawa: Post Map

by John McGee

Tsukasa Yokozawa, Spilt Milk, 2001, color photograph (Image courtesy the artist)

Scattered lights dot the deep, black nightscape. From afar, these large photographs (130cm X 100cm) could pass for minor images from the Hubble Space Telescope. At arm’s length though, the cohesion slips and the “constellations” dissolve into discrete apartment windows and solitary streetlights. Tsukasa Yokozawa’s recent nighttime photos of Kohoku New Town (a suburban development on the outskirts of Yokohama) explore such issues as community, isolation and the limits of visual registration. 

The elevated perspective (shot from a nearby hill) shows nothing like the promising, vast grid of the Los Angeles basin, which is a network of electricity, automobiles and streetlights uniting citizens in a cool, rational plan. Yokozawa’s night views reveal a growth not a grid--loosely grouped, disjointed, organic shapes of different hues (careful processing preserves the color of tungsten and fluorescent bulbs). Lights aren’t systematically placed in this town, they seep into it. The landscape has disappeared altogether, swallowed in nocturnal blackness and underexposed film. 

In his previous exhibition, “On the Margin,” Yokozawa documented a similar edge of legibility in his views of the towns of Sapporo and Hakodate. Photographed following heavy snowfall from famous scenic overlooks, these townscapes were mostly white, inverting the blindness of “post map” with the snow blindness of a sunny day. Only the tallest buildings protruded above the whitewash, like dirty crystals jutting through layers of salt, or remnant structures rising above the ash of some great destruction. 

The artist notes that, in Europe, architecture is a giant history lesson, the accretion of time and humanity carved into the surfaces of the city. Japan has no such tradition. Buildings are primarily boxes for work or sleep, destroyed and replaced after their 20-year period of utility. A former motorbike-riding mailman, Yokozawa finds that, in Japan, history, culture, and architecture are internal: Interiors hold the secrets, the people and the codes that bind them. He sees his light constellations (and the people they represent) as positive and affirming, calling them “small paradises.” 

Yet these “post map” lights, seen too close and intimate to be an anonymous tourist’s view, speak more of an insurmountable loneliness set in impenetrable, immeasurable space. Stars isolated by unfathomable distances only appear to be connected into Orions and Big Dippers. This illusion too has comforted for millennia. After the initial wonder though, star gazing always evokes shudders of incomprehensibility (or religion). Contact is not an option, the distances are too vast. 

Humans, like stars, have a natural affinity for each other, producing gravity and drawing each other near. And though the number of stars is nearly infinite, constellations countless and galaxies teeming, solar systems and double stars are comparatively rare. Yet, with the optimism of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence--if we wait, maybe someone will contact us), Yokozawa seems to trust in some affiliation among unseen parties, some grace in the ever-present wilderness. Joseph Conrad wrote, “We live as we dream, alone.” No doubt Yokozawa sleeps like an alligator--one eye open--watching for the invisible people who orbit their private suns.

This exhibition was held Jan 2001 at Gallery Yamaguchi in Kyobashi, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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