IKU
Solo Exhibition "In the Window"
2023.12.8-2024.1.21
In In the Window, landscapes extracted from a virtual world were presented as paintings, forming a structure in which interior and exterior spaces circulate through the motif of the window. By incorporating the window frames of Art Front Gallery, a nested situation was created in which paintings and exhibition space overlap, allowing the viewer’s gaze to move across multiple spatial layers. Beyond translating virtual space into two dimensions, three-dimensional motifs were installed in real space, producing a reversal between 2D and 3D perception. In particular, the sculptural realization of color trees materialized elements of the virtual world, bringing its sense of reality into the physical space.
The theme of the window has been developed since around 2011 and is grounded in the classical pictorial grammar of painting as a device that produces illusion. At the same time, the virtual world shares a structural similarity with the computer screen understood as a contemporary window frame. The window functions both as an opening toward the outside world and as a mediator reflecting inner states, operating as a layer through which psychological landscapes emerge.
Photo: Hiroshi Noguchi, provided by Art Front Gallery
On Harada Iku's realistic virtual world painting "In the Window"
Minoru Hatanaka (Chief Curator, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] )
Iku Harada generates virtual landscapes with 3D computer graphics, then transforms them into paintings. It may seem perverse. Today many artists use 3D CG, but not as a means to initiate paintings. She seems to be going the wrong way round, in a monumental detour. Is not the virtual world of 3D CG enough? Why does she shift this and make it into the central motif of her work? One answer has been proposed as relating to our post-Covid social conditions. I feel it is rather due to the simple fact that Harada is, above all, a painter.
Alberti likened a painting to a window onto the outside. We can also compare it to an entrance to virtual worlds (others have proposed painting as more like a curtain covering the window). If a painting is hung on a wall, it invites our gaze into the depths lying beyond, in a manner of a window. Paintings offer illusionistic extensions of the perspective lines of the real world, as they expand into alternative, imagined spaces.
This concept of a window now also relates to computer interface, which is similarly a mediation between zones. When we create windows, we open access points to another world. Windows let in outside air, allowing intercourse between inside and out. A landscape seen through a window is kind of vista borrowed by the interior. Windows are intersections across divided worlds.
Harada’s experiment presented in this exhibition goes further by combining a pictorial space with the real space of the venue. Space as a painting motif is reconfigured physically, so that the exhibition room comes to be something seen through a window. The installation layers inside and out in multiple dimensions. It encourages us to move visually between them. The virtual space that Harada took as her painting motif, is now turned into an Albertian window. What the viewer encounters is a transposition of 3D CG into 2D representation. Harada builds 3D qualities pertaining to virtual space within our actual, physical space. She focuses on the illusory effect caused by these alternating dimensions. In the presence of virtual worlds made real, we find ourselves overcome by fantastical and confusing realms. 3D installations look like 2D tableaux.
As various spatial orders interpenetrate, space as a whole is turned into something profoundly illusory. Harada’s installation implies that the imagined spaces which Alberti said were through the painted ‘window’, also occur this side of it.
Iku Harada solo exhibition "In the Window"
Venue: Art Front Gallery
◼︎Related talk events
Minoru Hatanaka (Chief Curator, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC]) x Iku Harada (Artist)
Date: January 12, 2024