A Reflection on the Works of Iku Harada: A Window That Can Be Opened and Closed at Will—On Our Place in This World
Clélia Czernik, Professor of Philosophy at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Art Critic, January 2020.
Iku Harada is a Japanese artist born in Yamagata in 1982. Most of her works are paintings based on virtual compositions created on a computer. From the very beginning of her creative process, she challenges the viewer's perception of the relationship between the virtual and real worlds. Harada's dazzling and perverse play creates not a world that merely generates images, but rather images that conjure up a worldview. (This is evident in her latest videos using 3D models.)
As Walter Benjamin states in "The Art of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), the gradual loss of the aura of artwork stems from the reproduction and manipulation of works, and is likely due to the rapid spread of 3D computer software. Harada's work, while utilizing computers, goes against this trend. Through the powerful allure of vividly colored canvases, she revives "painting" not as a reproduction, but as a uniquely recreated piece within virtual images where gloss has been removed and depth has been eliminated. In this way, she regenerates the image, breathing into it the very essence of sanctity, unity, and existence itself.
The illusion that Harada's works invite viewers into the space between computer-generated scenes shrouded in anonymity and landscapes inhabited by reality. In fact, the feeling of simultaneously being in both the world of images and the real world creates a coexistence between virtual and reality, producing a world of intersection between two and three dimensions, akin to a perceptual illusion. Furthermore, the window motif that frequently appears in Harada's works clarifies the boundary between virtual and reality. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the "history of art" since ancient times has boiled down to a discussion of how the status of the tableau as a window has developed as a diverse ontology. For example, Leon Battista Alberti, in his "On Painting" (1435), likens the essence of the tableau to an open window. Not only did the window play a role in the birth of painting, but the image of the window reveals various concepts such as inside and outside, surface and depth, objectivity and subjectivity, participation in the subject and maintaining distance from it, near and far, country and its landscape. Furthermore, windows are often accompanied by frames or transparent glass, serving as both boundaries and openings, like postcards of stationery, or even the breath of air. More broadly, they symbolize access to and perspective on an object, offering a chance to re-examine the possibility that other worlds similar to this one may exist, the nesting structure of one world within another, and the relationship between our familiar everyday world and other spaces. Alberti's windows, open to the world, weave realistic narratives, but from Matisse's decorative windows to Marcel Duchamp's pragmatic and humorous windows in "The Newly Made Widow," windows have always been intertwined with the history of art.
Today, windows are attracting even more attention as a metaphor for computer windows. They possess the function of virtualizing access to a fascinating, distant, and unreal world. Harada creates her works along this path, emphasizing abstract art. However, the balance is constantly shifting, on the one hand, there is the window left open to freely take in the outside air, and as a result, the window that establishes a relationship with the subject and its presence, and on the other hand, there is a restrained sense of distance that freezes the world through the play of abstract forms, a sense of unease that, when viewed from afar, simply makes the screen appear still with a mosaic of colors. In other words, Harada's two-dimensional works speak to how ambiguous our position in this world is. That is, we waver between the distant and the near, between awe and an active feeling of engaging with the subject. When viewing her works, the viewpoint flies overhead like a drone, deconstructing new virtual technologies. In doing so, the gaze slides like a kaleidoscope across a smooth screen without any clues or rough surfaces, as if forgetting that our own eyes are intently observing and present there, and that our eyes are responsible for that scene. The interplay of light and shadow that permeates Harada's paintings proves that opening a window encourages various flows of outside air and atmosphere.
Harada's window-related devices teach us how easily our distance from things can change. Distance is constantly fluid, from reality to abstraction, from habitable places to the far reaches of space, from hobbies to full-fledged businesses. Harada's windows, like the aperture of a camera lens, are constantly opening and closing, demonstrating our sense of perspective, our ability to escape from or enter Harada's world, to observe the real world to which we belong by looking at lines, and the possibility of existing within the world or within an image. Whether open or closed, isn't a window a noun given to the concept of taking responsibility for this world, whether for those who live within it or bystanders?