With Chanel, Dior and Gucci fast becoming household names, hipster culture is sweeping the nation. And itís indiscriminately affecting the young as well as the old. Japan in the last decennia has become the stage for a luxury frenzy, kept in constant abuzz by a scenery of digital billboard signs. It might then just be bowing to the age-old slogans in a high-tech wrapper - ìYou can become whatever you wantî, ìStay true to yourselfî, Ö - as a nation obsessed with status and fantasy, it thrives on the tantrics of the commercial industry.
Marked by her cultureís desires, artist Mayumi Kimura puts the claims of the commercial realm to the test. Casting herself in different roles, revealing her wishing and wanting in front of the camera, Kimura generously gives in to the address of advertising. To a troublesome effect: as she infuses the commercial slogans of self-empowerment onto herself, the artist gradually loses the authority to act and speak. In Karaoke Actress (2006), she hovers on just a square meter, lost and agitated; in Virtual Sanctuary (2003), she lays passive and silent on the bed. Kimuraís videoís and photographs, then, trace the basic structure of the economic apparatus: tapping into every aspect of the public and private domain, capitalism has refashioned reality to a sheer commodity. With man unable to connect to life only through the lens of the economic, his fate is alienation.
Furthering on her subject of interest, the AIR Antwerpen-residency has proven a particularly productive time for Kimura. In the pieces Re-Psycho and Blauwe Vogelstraat / Blue Bird Street, she made there as part of the Playback-quadrilogy, the artist ingenuously extends her artistic research. In Re-psycho she takes to Hitchcockís notorious classic Psycho, using her signature technique: a mixture of existing film footage and amateur replayings of scenes. In Kimuraís reimagining of the film, the spectacular horror shifts to the dreariness of the working place, with its strict repertoire of gestures and behaving. Blauwe Vogelstraat / Blue Bird Street centers around a dialogue on hope and understanding. But as the dialogue is built up by nearly twenty participants who even donít understand the language theyíre speaking, the message becomes fragmented and devoid of any signification. An apt metaphor for the condition of modern man.
Text: Bjˆrn Scherlippens
More about Mayumi Kimura: digitalartsgallery.co.uk/KIMURA.Exhibition.html
Marked by her cultureís desires, artist Mayumi Kimura puts the claims of the commercial realm to the test. Casting herself in different roles, revealing her wishing and wanting in front of the camera, Kimura generously gives in to the address of advertising. To a troublesome effect: as she infuses the commercial slogans of self-empowerment onto herself, the artist gradually loses the authority to act and speak. In Karaoke Actress (2006), she hovers on just a square meter, lost and agitated; in Virtual Sanctuary (2003), she lays passive and silent on the bed. Kimuraís videoís and photographs, then, trace the basic structure of the economic apparatus: tapping into every aspect of the public and private domain, capitalism has refashioned reality to a sheer commodity. With man unable to connect to life only through the lens of the economic, his fate is alienation.
Furthering on her subject of interest, the AIR Antwerpen-residency has proven a particularly productive time for Kimura. In the pieces Re-Psycho and Blauwe Vogelstraat / Blue Bird Street, she made there as part of the Playback-quadrilogy, the artist ingenuously extends her artistic research. In Re-psycho she takes to Hitchcockís notorious classic Psycho, using her signature technique: a mixture of existing film footage and amateur replayings of scenes. In Kimuraís reimagining of the film, the spectacular horror shifts to the dreariness of the working place, with its strict repertoire of gestures and behaving. Blauwe Vogelstraat / Blue Bird Street centers around a dialogue on hope and understanding. But as the dialogue is built up by nearly twenty participants who even donít understand the language theyíre speaking, the message becomes fragmented and devoid of any signification. An apt metaphor for the condition of modern man.
Text: Bjˆrn Scherlippens
More about Mayumi Kimura: digitalartsgallery.co.uk/KIMURA.Exhibition.html
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