Ayaka YOSHIDA
Translation↑
"Murmuring Shores / On the Brink"
December 14, 2024 (Sat.) – January 10, 2025 (Fri.)
Onomichi City University Art Museum
Co-curators:
Yutaka Inagawa & Wang Luobin
Participating Artists:
Woon Hui Shen | Liu Liling | Yumi Nishimura | Susanna Tan | Nana Tsugawa | Ayaka Yoshida
The moment of discovering logos within nature, an uncompromising demand placed upon nature, a grave negotiation with the mountain deity, an attempt to reduce information, constantly disrupted by the physical, the fundamental uncertainty of the world.
What should have been
Mixed Media, consisting of three types of works
A life-size venue map, wrinkled by the weight of stones (handout)
B3, 1,794 copies
A group of photographs
Stones and boxes (containers and contents)
Documentation of the wrinkling process during production
Uncompromisin demands on nature
A performance of folding a large blue tarpaulin into a box
Enter the number in the bottom-right corner of your venue map to find
a photograph of the stone that was once located at that exact spot
(Please enter a number between 0 and 1794.)
/1794
Error
When playing peekaboo, an infant is thought to experience the disappearance of another person's face as something close to an actual absence. As they grow, however, they gradually learn that even when a face is hidden behind a pair of hands, it continues to exist beyond what they can see.
We learn that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight, and that those who leave us, even temporarily, will eventually return. Simply because something was true yesterday, or the time before, we come to believe that it will remain true tomorrow.
In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes that adults cope with the unknown by relying on abstraction and categorization. Through language, social systems, and accumulated experience, the world comes to appear as something understandable. Animals, autistic people, and young children, by contrast, tend to perceive each event as singular and concrete. Their world is composed of independent moments—always new, and therefore more easily frightening.
Grandin also describes the brain's ability to reduce the world to a manageable scale as an ability that comes at a cost. By naming, classifying, and anticipating, we have learned to lessen uncertainty. Yet in doing so, we gradually lose our sensitivity to the world's finer details, to a degree that can seem almost like a sensory impairment.
The book introduces an autistic boy who insists on touching every bolt in his school building. His caregiver jokingly explains that he is making sure the building will not collapse on top of him.
Reading this reminded me of a passage by artist Koki Tanaka. On a train overseas, Tanaka saw a man testing each hanging strap with his full weight before finally sitting down. Curiously, he never tested the seat itself. Tanaka described him as "someone who reveals the uncertainty of the world." We grasp train straps every day without ever truly knowing whether they can support our weight.
Through conceptualization, we come to treat the world as something already understood. We hold onto train straps without checking them, believing that what was there yesterday will still be there tomorrow. Little by little, we forget how fundamentally uncertain the world has always been.
Grandin, Temple, & Johnson, Catherine. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Translated by Naoko Shinogi, NHK Publishing, 2006.
Tanaka, Koki. It’s Inevitably Fragmented. Akaaka Art Publishing, 2013.