On the Work of Iku HaradaAn Openable and Closable Window — On Our Position in This World

Clélia Zernik

Professor of Philosophy, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris; Art Critic

Iku Harada is a Japanese artist born in 1982 in Yamagata. Most of her works are paintings derived from virtual compositions created on a computer. From the very process of their production, her works unsettle the relationship between the viewer’s virtual and real worlds. The dizzying play of reversals that Harada orchestrates does not generate a world that produces images; rather, it produces images that generate a worldview. (This becomes evident when one watches her recent videos employing 3D models.)

As Walter Benjamin argued in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), the gradual loss of the artwork’s aura stems from its reproducibility and manipulability—a tendency accelerated by the rapid spread of 3D computer software. Yet while working with computers, Harada moves precisely against this current. Through the powerful appeal of vividly colored canvases, she revives “painting” within virtual images whose gloss has been flattened and whose depth has been eliminated—not as a copy, but as a regenerated unique piece. In doing so, she restores the image, breathing into it a sense of sacredness, singularity, and existential presence.

The illusion invited by Harada’s works casts the viewer between anonymous computer-generated landscapes and inhabitable real environments. Indeed, the sensation of inhabiting both the world of images and the real world simultaneously gives rise to a coexistence of the virtual and the actual, creating an interwoven realm of two and three dimensions akin to a perceptual mirage. Furthermore, the motif of the window, which frequently appears in Harada’s work, clarifies the boundary between the virtual and the real. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the history of art can be understood as a discourse on the status of the tableau as a window and its diverse ontological developments. In On Painting (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously compared the tableau to an open window. Beyond its foundational role in the birth of painting, the image of the window reveals numerous concepts: inside and outside, surface and depth, objectivity and subjectivity, participation in or distance from the object, far and near, nations and their landscapes. A window is both frame and transparent glass—boundary and opening, postcard and breath of air. More broadly, as a symbol of access and viewpoint, it suggests the possibility that worlds similar to ours may exist elsewhere, that one world may be nested within another, and that unfamiliar spaces may be related to the everyday world we know. While Alberti’s open window weaves realistic narratives, from Matisse’s decorative windows to Marcel Duchamp’s literal and humorous window in Fresh Widow, the window has always accompanied the history of art.

Today, the window has gained renewed attention as a metaphor for the computer screen. It functions as a virtualized access point to seductive, distant, and unreal worlds. Harada produces her works along this trajectory, which emphasizes abstraction. Yet the balance she strikes is constantly shifting—between the open window that freely admits the outside air and forges a relationship with the presence of the object, and a more restrained distance that freezes the world through the play of abstract forms, where from afar the surface may appear as a static mosaic of colors. In other words, Harada’s paintings speak of how ambiguous our position in this world truly is—oscillating between distance and proximity, between awe and active engagement.

When viewing her work, the gaze hovers like a drone in flight, deconstructing new virtual technologies. Without tactile clues or rough surfaces, the eye glides across the smooth pictorial field like a kaleidoscope, forgetting that it is both present and responsible for what it sees. The interplay of light and shadow that traverses Harada’s paintings demonstrates that the window opens, allowing currents of air and atmosphere to circulate.

Harada’s window apparatus teaches us how fluid the distance between ourselves and things can be. Distance shifts continuously—from the real to the abstract, from inhabitable places to remote horizons, from playful gesture to serious undertaking. Like the aperture of a camera lens, her windows open and close, altering our sense of perspective—allowing us to step out of her world or enter into it, to contemplate the reality to which we belong by following a line, or to exist within the world, or within the image. Whether open or closed, the window may ultimately be the noun given to the concept of bearing responsibility for this world—for those who live within it and for those who observe it from without.

Taipei Dangdai 2020

Venue: Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Hall 1 (S04)

Exhibition website