Artist in Convenience Stores
A series of several sheets of painting of a tree-shaded corner was my first encounter with Yu Hara’s work. Each piece is composed of three or four flowers. While the structure of each is the same, the line and color tint slightly differ from one another. Or "displaced" they may seem. The original image derived from a frame of a comic book, which had been photocopied dozens of times with copiers at convenience stores and bookstores. Thus, the more distant there was between the original image and the painter by repetition of copying, the closer they became. And it was not until then that she started to paint on her own on canvas with oils. This is opposite to a procedure of painting by observing a real-life flower.
Since the series is named "am pm series" and "ABC(Aoyama Book Center)series", we are led to realize the mundaneness of the act at convenience stores and book stores. Works of Yu Hara are possessed with the absorption of the artist in the process from photocopying to completing a painting as if that absorption is a mysterious story.
Around the same time, she exhibited as many as 36 turtles carved in wood. They were based on images gathered from picture books and magazines, where each of them had lived separate lives with respective stories. By woodcarving, or copying, so to speak, they gathered and started to go in the same direction. Here, images are transformed, stories inscribed in each turtle are intertwined, and we can vividly imagine the work of carving wood she must have been devoted to.
Such works stated above were presented at "Urashima—Yu Hara Solo Exhibition". The venue was conceptual since the exhibition was comprised of sequence and transformation as a series, and it was fun to decipher the mystery. At the same time, however, every work was painted, carved, and spelled with hands. They are adorable--here lies the attractiveness of Yu Hara’s works in the first place.
A small set of 8 pieces by color pencils entitled "KAGAKU NO TOMO--KAWARIDAMA (Mate of Science--Color-Changing Drops) was also amazing. They could almost be called original pictures of an illustrated book. Junior high school students buy some KAWARIDAMA drops and walk back home from school with the drops in their mouth, seeing the scenery changing to blue or pink. The story is such a simple tale of transformation. The audience is surprised at how audacious the artist is not to hesitate to present the plain story. We are also absorbed into the amusing description of characters. Rather, we are bewildered to find ourselves at a loss for words to explain. It was the first time I appreciated "art works" that way.
The objects of painting and the act of painting are strictly distanced, and oils, dessin, and objets are orderly allocated : the structure rules the whole space of the venue. This tendency became increasingly prominent in her exhibitions later on. At "Tenki To Tenki To Tenki (Weather, Mystery of Nature, and Transcription)” at Ayumi Gallery, for instance, the same designs implying fog, rain, lake surface, and strata, are converted on different bases in different sizes with varying media such as pencil, oil, water color, and embroidery. Furthermore, the title of the exhibition is composed of words changed to homophones in sequence. As if to follow the turn of the weather, a way to go around the art works was induced, until a bare wash stand, uncovered walls, and gaps of stairs were seen as phenomena of weather. The basic act of copying is shifted to the movement itself, or the speed itself, without being noticed, and begins to affect the viewers.
At "never lasting" Exhibition at La Galerie des Nakamura, the gallery was just like inside of a boutique, so carefree as if almost all was improvised and put around just for the time being. Junior high school students in "KAWARIDAMA" grew up to be legendary boys and girls and showed up. "Patchwork-san", "Mummy Man", and "Girl Chosen by Thunder" are a series of portraits that, more than a little, extends beyond paintings. In these works, canvas on frames turn into the outline of faces, on which canvas cloths split into small pieces are sewed. Among works displayed were clothes of boys and girls named "Amami Yuji", "Sakaki Kyoko" and so on (drawn on canvas which has been cut into the shapes of jackets and pants). The characters seem similar to figures in comic books or animation, but they are far from them. The characters in Yu Hara’s works are intricately in succession to the exhibition space, or they become the space itself. They even create an atmosphere of being displayed in lords' rooms. They look like works of Velazquez. Room decorated with portraits that have been repeatedly photocopied is transformed to the most secular space in our times.
"Shadow" Story of The Story
Another remarkable work of "transformation" was first open to public at the collaboration exhibition with Rintaro Hara. A picture book composed of transformations of words with illustrations matched to the converted stories. As Rintaro Hara explains on an occasion of "Translation?HENKAN (Conversion)" Exhibition at YANAKA foundation gallery, Japanese old tales are remade using gaps between the original and the outcome of translation through Japanese-English translation soft wares (which not only exclude historical backgrounds and locality, emotion and meanings between lines, but also add noises [mistranslations], so that the original passages are converted to different meanings). Even though at the time of collaboration exhibition both gaps of words and attached illustrations by Yu Hara were adjusted to an extent that there was still reminiscent of the original, books later published " Princess Kaguya Being Smelled" and "Urashima Taro with Striped Back" contain upgraded version of converted stories and illustrations, where more noises are in rage. Conversions with machines which take no accounts of contents are as close to us as convenience stores, and now is the time when anyone is living with the displacement unconcernedly. With lively lines and colors, Yu Hara depicts only the discrepancy. Each tale proceeds with a pair of the original (stories and pictures, which any Japanese would be familiar with) and the converted (stories and pictures). Converted words and illustrations are displaced from the original, or is a shadow, but here in the books, the illustrations attached to the original is mono-colored and those attached to the "shadow" is colored very vividly and translucently. The images in these books are pure, independent of the story of fantasy, and compelling ,far from nonsensical games. While they seem to have been drawn totally freely, they, in reality, trace the converted stories quite precisely to details. Japanese folk tales the books are based on are stories of travelers from different worlds such as “Issun Boushi (The Inch-High Samurai)”, “Kaguya Hime(The Princess Kaguya)”, and “Momotaro (The Peach Boy)”, or a story about a man who has traveled another world and returned, only to find no places to go back, “Urashima Taro” , and stories about ordinary persons who receive grace from different worlds like “Tsuru No Ongaeshi (The Grateful Crane)” and “Hanasaka Jiisan( The Old Man Blowing Cherryblossoms)”. With limited procedure of converting, a shadow domain or a unknown world behind the original tales unexpectedly comes into light. Those who have copying machines, computers, and mobile phones at hand are unconsciously familiar to the existence of such unknown world. That is why anyone can enjoy this unprecedented picture book. There is a dynamism which connects convenience stores and a different world.
Delight in Reciprocation
In a series of "Flying Classroom", beginning in 2005, depicted is a universe into which Yu Hara herself jumps as a heroine of a story just like "Alice in Wonderland" and in which familiar things and signs explode, and usual days seamlessly change and extend as a different world. For example, in a work of the series, fifty to sixty chairs are blown high up in the air. Every chair is drawn in its complete form, but each one appears one fragment in the spiral movement. The series as a whole is cast under a spell of transformation and we are dazzled, feeling as if our surroundings were scattered over the sky shaping like a nebular. When working on this series, she starts painting improvisationally without preparing the structure beforehand. On white canvas can we get glimpses of common images and symbols such as coffee cups, guitars, brooms, electric light stands, insects, frogs, dogs, stuffed toys, or even signs of shops, logos of goods. All of them are hovering in the air of improvisation as if they were in a state of weightlessness, and each icon is complete in itself at the same time as it is fragmented. The works can even be felt as visualization of music. One group of fliers calls for another, and entire movement becomes bigger and bigger.
What develops on canvas escapes the method of "appreciation of paintings" and directly reaches anybody who sees her works. Plainness is her originality. One art work in this series is exhibited as a mural at an elementary school. Pupils there see the painting and also read endless stories in it. The expansion of the universe is beyond prediction, but in one of her latest works "swallow fish" we see looming far-off in the nebular a figure lovely but somewhat weird. Weirdness means nothing but the depth of profound story her works always take on like a magnetic force. The ordinary goods and letters, in turn, go against the entire story, attempting to tell a different tale. There has ceaselessly been reciprocation of the totality and the details, and repetition of copying and hand drawing in Yu Hara's works. In that intercommunication, all around us begins to appear, even surprisingly, signs of delight.
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