Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Taro Shinoda: Helicopter 1

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

Taro Shinoda: Helicopter 1

by John McGee

Taro Shinoda, Helicopter 1, 2003, plastic, radio controller, stainless steel,
LED, motor, batteries, 3m diameter (Photo: John McGee)

Gallery Side 2 has not been turned into a Mattel R&D lab. It's just Helicopter 1 (2003), a new installation by Taro Shinoda. A small, radio-controlled red plastic helicopter hovers at the end of an aluminum boom hung from a pole in the middle of the gallery. When its rotor spins, the chopper circles over a tangled landscape of frilly, twisting blue power lines running over mouse-high orange plastic electrical towers. A pair of sturdy aluminum brackets holding curved shelves project out from the wall. Plastic men, all with the same mask-like smiley faces and arms raised high overhead, stand on the platforms. Illuminated by banks of small lights, they seem to anticipate ascension. 

Shinoda (b. 1964) says that part of the inspiration for the installation was a helicopter rescue he recently witnessed in the ocean off Rio de Janeiro. Helicopter 1, however, is not an illustration. It's many different things (including the lights and sounds of the US Air Force base near his home) distilled through his psyche. He hasn't quite figured out what it means yet. "It's like when you try to explain a dream to somebody," says the artist. 

Most of the time the installation is in suspended animation, waiting for a "pilot" to fly the helicopter and perhaps carry the people from one platform to another. 

Taro Shinoda, Helicopter 1 (close up)
(Courtesy: Gallery Side 2)

Or maybe the smiley-faced guys hope to be transported to the separate mini-exhibition of watercolor paintings from Shinoda's 2001-2003 "Gardening" series. 

This first show of Shinoda's paintings, hanging in the gallery office, features 14 odd Edens. Gangly, primordial trees, stick bamboo and sickly mushrooms painted in a flat, naive style (Shinoda never studied drawing) sprout around streams and ponds on a white ground. Naked men and women lounge on Shinoda-designed modernist furniture around the watercourses. A man with an erection leans back on a three-part recliner, a woman kneels on a yellow lily pad, and a couple...umm...get it on atop a rectangular blue chaise. They're not lurid, just weird modernist utopias, like Persian miniatures painted by a slightly perverted Giotto after reading too much "Abitare." "They are my idea of what a beautiful place is," says the artist.

When young, Shinoda attended a special high school to learn how to create and tend traditional Japanese gardens. "The Japanese garden is the same concept as contemporary art," he says, "but art is more personal." Previous garden references in Shinoda's work have been more technological. One of his first major pieces was Milk, an indoor "garden" where fluorescent lights slid above a floor of white liquid. 

Helicopter 1 may not be a garden, but it is a landscape, one with a considered arrangement of contrasts in scale (giant people, miniature power lines) and texture (rigid aluminum, soft plastic). Like the low rolling plastic tabletop garden sculptures he also made for his "Gardening" series (two are also on view in the office), Helicopter 1 invokes a kind of modern, inverted Romanticism. Rather than placing humans in front of an awesome force, Shinoda places us god-like above it. We look down on a self-contained, though somewhat messy, microcosmic world spinning on its own axis. 

Maybe the orbiting Helicopter is like a mechanical whirling dervish. If you contemplate it long enough, it will take you into a state of bliss. Or, if you're lucky, to wherever Shinoda's paintings are.

This exhibition was held Oct 2003 at Gallery Side 2 in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.