Continuing its commitment to bring challenging and innovative work to Stirling, The Changing Room presented the first solo exhibition in Scotland by Hana Sakuma (6 April - 18 May 2002).
Born in Japan, Hana Sakuma has lived and worked in London for the past eight years. A significant detail as her approach to her work is underpinned by the experience of living as an adult in a culture different to the one that she was brought up in as a child, exploring the creation of a new language with which to communicate ideas or, more pertinent to Sakuma, raise questions or suggest starting points for debate.
Often whimsical, occasionally quite severe, Hana Sakuma’s work presents a language of objects and ‘things’ imbued with meaning quite removed from their day to day reference or customary identity. The unravelling of meaning may be aided by quiet prompts in the titles of the works such as ‘The Practised Hand’ 2001, or through consideration of the plethora of written information, back catalogues, articles, etc. about the artist that form a substantial body of supporting information. But ultimately if the viewer is looking for ‘meaning’ from their own visual response they may be disappointed. The world does not look like the monochromatic angularity of much of the forms that the artist creates for the Changing Room show. There is a plastic, inorganic quality to her works, even in those pieces punctuated with organic material or references, such as the bees in ‘Anticlockwise’ 2001 or the bag of pasta in ‘Diffelence’ 2001, that places our reading of the visual response beyond the comfort of recognition. The visual world is coloured, textured, constructed; forms play against each other bathed in light or cloaked in darkness. It is spatial, complex and uncontainable; realised through an infinite number of possibilities. Hana Sakuma’s works enter this world as new forms conceived as a consequence of a set of possibilities which address themes such as mortality, language and concealment. But more importantly for Sakuma, they are created through a series of procedures rooted in the personal experience of the repetitive ritual of childhood, in particular to the artist’s own formative years in Japan. There is a shared experience here that engages the viewer. The pieces enter the space not as references to the visual world and how it works but as unique objects, which now become part of that visual world, manufactured as a consequence of their meaning.
The desire to strip artwork down to a single reference point is a modern condition. However the process of thought facilitates layered possibilities. There is a danger in presenting ‘punchlines’ where once the meaning is revealed or deciphered, the work becomes an idea and its physical manifestation becomes redundant. The viewer is left to decide whether the work itself remains an autonomous world contained within its own set of values by which it is measured or whether it exists only if propped up by the idea from which it was conceived.
In ‘From the Middle to the Middle’, our visual engagement with the works serves as a prompt to trigger a set of ‘literal’ or non visual references concerning what the work is about. However these ‘literals’ are not overtly stated and the responsibility falls to the viewer to draw personal interpretation from the work. By this definition our approach to, or interpretation of, the pieces will never be wrong or misread but by the same token the works may never really be ‘there’. Ironically, there is an absence of risk if all that we are expected to do is reaffirm our own position. This may highlight a lack of ambition from the artist but could also be indicative of the penetration of ‘market-led’ values in the promotion of what is essentially an noncommercial activity, i.e that of discovery, revelation and debate.
The Changing Room exhibition presents a set of possibilities often reaffirming what we already know, at times turning our collective ‘sense of being’ on it’s head but always inviting debate. It does however devolve the responsibility of the artist as ‘spokesperson’ and in a collection of work that aims to present the completeness of being where action and thought are given form, many of the ideas still run parallel to the objects without actually converging. If there is a shortfall in reaching a wider audience or debate the responsibility may not lie with the artist but perhaps with the way in which we continue to approach artwork.
Paul Eames
May 2002