Imploding urban worlds that radiate a dystopian feeling like black holes, but then in a digital universe; Ryoichi Kurokawa’s puzzling artworks stick with you for a while. The Berlin-based Japanese audiovisual artist masters a mystical-like ability to magnify rhythms and forms of both nature and urban environments. Through his installations, he instigates his audience by illuminating notions of the natural world often not perceived, or overlooked.
Sculpturing time
Experiencing Kurokawa’s work triggers a sense of reality switching. Whether it being through ‘recordings of waterfalls obliterating into white noise while [...] forming an almost spiritual and reverential stillness around the viewer, or through field recordings in combination with computer generated structures’, one enters a new world, while oddly sensing a familiarity towards certain visual, sonic, or emotional sensations. Daily elements, such as trees, windows, water, and even stairs, get progressively distorted, turning a harmonious vision of daily reality into a dystopian ‘un-harmonious world of war and destruction’.
The uses of space to reproduce images and sounds are reinvented in endless ways. Contravening the tendency of showcasing audiovisual works on single 2D screens, Kurokawa uses a full room. With screens constituting different shapes and being placed in riveting ways, the gaze of the viewer and how their bodies are positioned in space also drastically change within his installations. It goes from laying on the ground under a dome of moving images (‘in s.asmbli’) to following a wave of screens amid a dark space, like with‘ad/ab Atom’.
'I describe my audiovisual pieces as time sculptures'
In a way, Kurokawa induces a sense of experiencing everyday nature (which for him also includes urban spaces) from an unknown time dimension. Whenever any moment is experienced, the sounds and images present at that specific time come together. Given that, Kurokawa gives attention to the fact that an audiovisual composition is the practice of putting together sonic and visual elements, collected at different moments in time. He describes this process as the act of sculpting time: ‘Since my practice involves carving and modelling time layers of sound and imagery, I describe my audiovisual pieces as time sculptures’. With this, there is a stimulus specific to his works; an eerie, yet fascinating feeling of accessing the urban and natural world from a different dimension. It is almost like having a memory of something yet to happen, but that already exists in the boundless possibilities of time and space.
Animating the city
A question that likely comes to mind: how can such an abstract combination of sound and images be so confronting, yet so relatable? The fact that nature is Kurokawa’s main source of inspiration may be the reason why. His work follows the rich animistic tradition present in Japanese art. Animism perceives all things as being animated, as having a soul; it builds intimacy between the human gaze and the world around them.
By adding a digital layer to this animistic tradition, Kurokawa achieves spectral art experiences. Both the harmonious traits of pristine nature and the raw and unbalanced aspects of urban spaces, all come to life. The personality of a world under destruction and the kindness of untouched environments are translated into the installations, resulting in many realities. Natural sources from the artist’s field recordings progressively mutate from their original form, revealing a visual and auditory universe of their own, animated with light convulsions and hypnotic pulsations.
Animating the city
A question that likely comes to mind: how can such an abstract combination of sound and images be so confronting, yet so relatable? The fact that nature is Kurokawa’s main source of inspiration may be the reason why. His work follows the rich animistic tradition present in Japanese art. Animism perceives all things as being animated, as having a soul; it builds intimacy between the human gaze and the world around them.
By adding a digital layer to this animistic tradition, Kurokawa achieves spectral art experiences. Both the harmonious traits of pristine nature and the raw and unbalanced aspects of urban spaces, all come to life. The personality of a world under destruction and the kindness of untouched environments are translated into the installations, resulting in many realities. Natural sources from the artist’s field recordings progressively mutate from their original form, revealing a visual and auditory universe of their own, animated with light convulsions and hypnotic pulsations.
Kurokawa’s visual language suggests a fearless artistic vision. He creates massive and imposing structures (such as in ‘node 5:5’), but also includes intrinsic and delicate elements, as is done in ‘elementum’. He blends different (and often opposite) forces and factors in a fascinating way.
Ultimately, Kurokawa simply mirrors the abundance of forces and possibilities present in every human, natural and urban world, through a not-so-simple set of skills. His work is striking, because the energies present in natural and built environments are striking in and of themselves. Visiting his installations can be a peek into people’s inner and outer familiar worlds, as well as an unexpected abstraction of what their realities were or are yet to become.
Kurokawa’s works are luckily on display in a few different locations, resignifying and repurposing a variety of spaces. Currently his work ‘Líthi’ is on exhibit at KAMU [Kanazawa/Japan], ‘rm’ at ACC (Asia Culture Center) [Gwangju/Korea], and "in s.asmbli [VR version]" in Pittlerwerke [Leipzig/Germany]. ‘Subassemblies’ will be soon displayed at Caixa Forum [Barcelona/Spain], at Dokufest [Prizren/Kosovo], and at NOAD [A Coruna/Spain]; as well as ‘rm’ at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts [Taichung/Taiwan].
