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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Another World Museum Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Another World Museumby John McGee  Kazuhiko Hachiya, Moewe 1/16, 2003,
balsa, Styrofoam, tape Sometimes you just need a cigarette. But you work in a no-smoking office, there’s no time to go outside, and oh yeah, you quit. No problem, just plug in Tatsuo Majima’s PlayStation game Desktop Smoking ver. 1 (Cigarette Dream). It’s almost too simple to qualify as a game but nearly as addictive as nicotine. One button does all the work. Push it once to open the onscreen pack of Marlboro reds. Push it again and a cigarette pops out. The third time, a lighter sparks it and the big drama starts—smoke curls up and organ music huffs in the background. Keep pressing the button to make the cigarette burn down and to stamp it out in the ashtray. Each game is limited to two cigarettes, but you can always play another round, moving on to Menthols or Seven Stars. Majima’s puffy diversions and the daydreams of six other Japanese and European artists form “Another World Museum.” Curator (and artist) Taro Shinoda says that he’s interested in the border of reality and fiction and that the imagination births Matrix-like multiple realities. Here, some are miniaturized, some fantasized and most just out of reach. Kyoco Taniyama’s white metal dollhouse, Stairs (2003), for example, bridges three corners of the gallery, climbing in short, disconnected sections to an unattainable Juliet balcony high overhead. Too small for a person, the curved ledge just might fit your glamorous (or melancholy) projected self… Sorry, access denied to this dream—the entrance to the staircase is roped off, for VIPs only. Perhaps you could reach it by riding on Kazuhiko Hachiya’s flying wing, Moewe 1/16 (2003), a recreation of the airplane in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Underneath the 1/16 scale balsa and foam model, a video shows the successful flight of a 1/2 scale, radio-controlled version. Hachiya hopes to flesh out a full-scale (8-meter) anime aircraft large enough to carry a real person. Saki Satom inverts this idea. In her video Space of One’s Own (2003), she spins endlessly in a cramped metal box meant to suggest the inside of a TV. 
Tatsuo Majima, Desktop Smoking Where the Japanese artists search for solitude, the Europeans are more social. Belgian Sven Augustijnen’s voyeur video Lets op Bach (1998) peers through a Rear Window and into a dance workshop across the street. Men and women leap, swat each other, swig from bottles, and wave at the camera in this fake peep show, really a choreographed performance by the Brussels troupe Les Ballets C. de la B. In cardboard Motorway (2001), by German Thomas Bayrle, mini roads zigzag up and down, flip back over themselves and fold around their neighbors, weaving a chain-link freeway system. Boxy little trucks and cars stick to the warped roadbeds, defying gravity but going nowhere. For actual destinations, try LAND (2002). The four Danes of non-profit group N55 have been accumulating plots of land around the world, outlining a connect-the-dots of donated utopias where anyone can visit, camp, hang out, whatever. They designate the designer timeshares with stainless steel tetrahedral cairns. Inside are manuals about a modular way to live off the grid. In the gallery office, drawings of Shinoda’s own alternate universe sculptures—tiny Japanese gardens on low rolling tables and a “Personal Satellite Project”—reveal that for him too, it’s a small world after all. _______________________________________This exhibition was held June-July 2003 at Gallery Side 2 in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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