Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Thomas Demand

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

Thomas Demand

by John McGee

In the photo, a stairway leads up to an open door in the side of an airplane. Haven't you seen this somewhere before? Yes, usually there's a visiting dignitary standing at the top of the stairs waving to the press and fans. But there are no people in this photo. And the backdrop isn't real. German artist Thomas Demand (b. 1964) made it entirely from cardboard, colored paper and glue. 

Thomas Demand, Gangway, 2001, 
C-print/Diasec, 220x180cm
(Images courtesy the artist and 
Taka Ishii Gallery)

Demand bases his paper models on found images, reproducing their perspective, color and scale. The airplane photo Gangway (2001), for example, mimics a news photo of the Pope visiting Berlin. The other three photos (and one series) in Demand's debut solo show in Japan are reconstructions of gold bullion, an empty locker room, tenement apartments and leaves. Demand builds the paper models full-scale, meaning the airplane and stairway were built the same size as a real airplane and stairway. The prints, too, are 1:1 scale—Gangway is over two meters high—giving a clear view onto the rumpled surfaces and loose edges of Demand's paper-thin memories. "They're like windows," says the artist. 

Windows into the past, perhaps. Demand, trained as a sculptor, never keeps his paper creations. He builds them, photographs them, and then destroys them. Though superficially similar to the paper Mercedes and AmEx cards of Chinese funerals (both address the transitory), Demand's models are more like movie sets. They exist to be photographed and last only as long as the shoot. And in this process of documentation, sculpture and photograph become one. 

Thomas Demand, Kabine, 2002,
C-print/Diasec, 180x252cm 

Movie sets are made to look as genuine as possible, down to real Coke cans and faux wood grain. Demand (who has made several short films), however, strips away fine details like text, producing too-clean, generic versions of things. The tops of the gold bars in Bullion (2003), for example, are embossed with a simple circle, not origin and purity stamps. Even his trash looks new—the crumpled cup under the bench in the locker room scene Kabine (2002) was never used for drinking, only as a prop to signify "used cup." 

Flare (2002) is a stop-animation sequence rather than the one-act sets of the other photos. Shot at regular intervals, the series of 28 images captures sunlight streaming through leaves throughout the day. Of course, as in all his photos, the leaves are merely paper, the sun, a studio light. (Because Taka Ishii Gallery can't accommodate the whole series at once, the Flare photos are being shown in pairs and rotated periodically). 

Thomas Demand, Public Housing, 
2003, C-print/Diasec, 100x150cm 

Another unusual—and the most overtly political—piece in this show is Public Housing (2003), a pinkish photo of roughly constructed modern apartment buildings next to an empty playground. Demand's source image in this case was not a photo but the drawing on the back of a Singapore $10 bill. 

Demand is a one-man scene shop creating images that anticipate dramatic moments. Yet there are never any people in the photos—the drama is forever suspended. This absence focuses attention on the uncanny stillness of Demand's photographic trompe l'oeil. Ironically, the sets are analogous to figures in a wax museum—they are both very real and very fake.

This exhibition was held June-July 2003 at Taka Ishii Gallery in Shinkawa, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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