ART CITIES:London-Hiraki Sawa
Hiraki Sawa’s work is acclaimed for his production of fleeting and ultimately personal experiences for viewers. He allows visitors to explore unexpected worlds and the interweaving of domestic and imaginary spaces. Populated with animals, inanimate objects and people, his characters search for their ‘place’ in the universe as he explores ideas of memory, displacement and migration.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Parafin Gallery Archive
Hiraki Sawa creates his videos through a process of taking digital photos, and cutting and pasting images by hand to create his collages, which he then animates. For his first solo exhibition with Parafin Gallery in London, presents the Installation “Man in Camera”, a new series of drawings and a selection of recent small-scale works that have not previously been seen in the UK. “Man in Camera” (2015-16), is an installation comprising a single screen projection accompanied by sculpture and drawings. The film combines uncanny domestic interiors with exquisite hand drawn animation. A recurrent motif is the ladder, a powerful symbol of both ascent and escape. Yet within the enclosed domestic landscape of Sawa’s work, the ladders lead nowhere, and the figures that climb them are engaged in hermetic, repetitive. The new small drawings are formally reminiscent of postage stamps. For these works Sawa scanned old family photographs and found images and then worked over them with fine white ink lines. The postage stamp is perhaps a symbol of communication, especially between near and far. Again, ladders feature, alongside ghostly figures, giving the impression of memory being layered upon memory. In his earlier works, like “dwelling” (2002), “elsewhere” (2003) and “trail” (2005), he integrated familiar items found in his room at home (toy airplanes, dishes, stationary supplies, animal shadows) as allegorical images to create fantastic scenes within ordinary spaces, an approach that found wide appeal. In more recent years, he has been exploring and expanding the potential of video as an expressive medium, using multiscreen projections and sound effects situated in three-dimensional spaces to create installations that attempt to transform video from something merely watched to something physically experienced. For the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Sawa moved into new realms of expression with an installation titled “O” (2009), in which he interpreted feelings resonating within him during his travels around Australia’s aboriginal outback as turning, spiraling time intervals linked together and expressed in space using video and sounds.
Info: Parafin Gallery, 18 Woodstock Street, London, Duration: 15/7-17/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk
