Natsuki Takauji solo show
Lifelines
Curated by Kourosh Mahboubian
SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC
625 Madison Avenue, Booth 1108
September 6 – 11, 2023
Photo Credit: SPRING/BREAK
Curatorial Essay by Kourosh Mahboubian:
Japanese born artist Natsuki Takauji has long been fascinated with the interaction of the personal and the communal. A substantial portion of her output is in the form of interactive sculptures for public spaces. Working in welded steel and multimedia constructions, she twists raw metal into objects with elegant modernist lines, melding their motion with conceptual elements in such a way that we find ourselves engaging in physical and mental gymnastics while experiencing the work. We can sense our bodies moving in step with her objects, and we cease being viewers to become participants.
Lifelines, the exhibition, brings together two distinct series of the artist’s work – Believers and Life Lines (the sculpture series) – into one installation. Takauji turns the exhibition itself into the artwork, using the opportunity, like with her individual objects, to fuse disparate elements into an experiential flow. Once again, participants move in step with lines connecting hard physical elements to conceptual imagery.
The series Believers developed out of Takauji’s discomfort with organized religion. In the aftermath of World War II, Shintoism lost its status as Japan’s national religion. The ensuing religious void brought about many questions around spirituality for generations of Japanese people. This fostered Takauji’s desire to look inward and pursue the subjects of beliefs and social phenomena in her work.
Influenced by Japanese illustration culture, she used AI to generate a set of Manga styled images based on photographs of leaders of a broad, multicultural, multi-generational cross-section of religious groups. While she found the AI results terrifying, she maintains that they visualize values that are deeply embedded in our society.
To create the final product, Takauji printed the images on paper and clear film, layering them in unlimited variations until desirable images were achieved. Each work compresses the individualities of multiple religious leaders – humans wielding power over their respective domains – into a single abstraction with a beautiful, mysterious depth. Religious power, along with its publicly dictated social morays, and political structure are stripped away to allow the participant’s direct and personal contemplation of spirituality.
Life Lines is an outgrowth of Takauji’s most recent public art project, The Heart of the Tree, currently on view at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Its figure-like tree structure takes inspiration from her thoughts about the life cycle of humans, trees, and nature; deforestation and forestation; mortality and immortality; selfishness and generosity; and the crucial damage and revitalization to our lives, society, and the earth.
Entering the installation, the focus on the far wall is a central image of a large tree with roots, resembling a matriarchal figure wearing a colorful dress, its roots and branches devoid of color. Fruit shaped pieces of hand-blown colored glass hanging from stands surround the tree as outgrowths, like IV drips, with dangling metal branches and roots. Adjacent walls are each lined with a row of Believers series images. Rubber tubes connected to the drips snake overhead, feeding the various elements of the installation, ultimately reaching those images. Takauji imagines these drips as metaphoric lifelines – emergency measures we may choose to accept by aligning our personal lives with the greater good and the needs of the world around us, in order to survive. Above the tree lies a triangular field of green. Symbolic of a hope for the future, the field is made from a magnified image of Takauji’s own eggs, which she has had medically frozen in the hope of someday becoming a mother.
Through the motion of her lines Takauji challenges us to follow a path. The delicacy of the work leaves us hanging between beauty and fragility. The abstractions beg us to ask unanswerable questions; and having put it all together one can’t help but to feel the artist’s omnipresent sense of gratitude.
Japanese born artist Natsuki Takauji has long been fascinated with the interaction of the personal and the communal. A substantial portion of her output is in the form of interactive sculptures for public spaces. Working in welded steel and multimedia constructions, she twists raw metal into objects with elegant modernist lines, melding their motion with conceptual elements in such a way that we find ourselves engaging in physical and mental gymnastics while experiencing the work. We can sense our bodies moving in step with her objects, and we cease being viewers to become participants.
Lifelines, the exhibition, brings together two distinct series of the artist’s work – Believers and Life Lines (the sculpture series) – into one installation. Takauji turns the exhibition itself into the artwork, using the opportunity, like with her individual objects, to fuse disparate elements into an experiential flow. Once again, participants move in step with lines connecting hard physical elements to conceptual imagery.
The series Believers developed out of Takauji’s discomfort with organized religion. In the aftermath of World War II, Shintoism lost its status as Japan’s national religion. The ensuing religious void brought about many questions around spirituality for generations of Japanese people. This fostered Takauji’s desire to look inward and pursue the subjects of beliefs and social phenomena in her work.
Influenced by Japanese illustration culture, she used AI to generate a set of Manga styled images based on photographs of leaders of a broad, multicultural, multi-generational cross-section of religious groups. While she found the AI results terrifying, she maintains that they visualize values that are deeply embedded in our society.
To create the final product, Takauji printed the images on paper and clear film, layering them in unlimited variations until desirable images were achieved. Each work compresses the individualities of multiple religious leaders – humans wielding power over their respective domains – into a single abstraction with a beautiful, mysterious depth. Religious power, along with its publicly dictated social morays, and political structure are stripped away to allow the participant’s direct and personal contemplation of spirituality.
Life Lines is an outgrowth of Takauji’s most recent public art project, The Heart of the Tree, currently on view at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Its figure-like tree structure takes inspiration from her thoughts about the life cycle of humans, trees, and nature; deforestation and forestation; mortality and immortality; selfishness and generosity; and the crucial damage and revitalization to our lives, society, and the earth.
Entering the installation, the focus on the far wall is a central image of a large tree with roots, resembling a matriarchal figure wearing a colorful dress, its roots and branches devoid of color. Fruit shaped pieces of hand-blown colored glass hanging from stands surround the tree as outgrowths, like IV drips, with dangling metal branches and roots. Adjacent walls are each lined with a row of Believers series images. Rubber tubes connected to the drips snake overhead, feeding the various elements of the installation, ultimately reaching those images. Takauji imagines these drips as metaphoric lifelines – emergency measures we may choose to accept by aligning our personal lives with the greater good and the needs of the world around us, in order to survive. Above the tree lies a triangular field of green. Symbolic of a hope for the future, the field is made from a magnified image of Takauji’s own eggs, which she has had medically frozen in the hope of someday becoming a mother.
Through the motion of her lines Takauji challenges us to follow a path. The delicacy of the work leaves us hanging between beauty and fragility. The abstractions beg us to ask unanswerable questions; and having put it all together one can’t help but to feel the artist’s omnipresent sense of gratitude.