Life can be incredibly surprising at times. And so it happened that, in the last few years, Japanese artist Suzume Uchida went from exorcising her anxieties and fears through her works, to collaborating with Yohji Yamamoto and creating illustrations of haunting spirits for the fashion designer's menswear collections. The new year opened for Uchida with another collaboration, this time with a poet and writer.
While she was on a plane heading to Paris to see Yamamoto's latest menswear show (taking place this afternoon), her latest exhibition had just opened in Japan.
The event, entitled "Everlasting Stars", opened indeed yesterday on the 7th floor of the Tokyo-based department store Mitsukoshi-Nihonbashi (until January 20th). The exhibition features Suzume Uchida's art and the writing of award-winning poet Ayako Noguchi Member of the Future Tanka Association.
Last year Uchida started a very personal project, a sort of correspondence with Noguchi: the artist would send a painting or a drawing and the writer would respond with a tanka. Tanka (meaning "short song") poetry refers to a Japanese 31-syllable poem, traditionally written as a single, unbroken line and featuring different figures of speech, including personifications, metaphors and similes.
Suzume Uchida employs quite a few metaphors in the works included in this compact exhibition: the title of the event doesn't for example refer to an actual star, but to a light that, shining bright in our hearts can lead us out of darkness, while "Portrait of a girl and a pigeon" is a metaphorical representation of light and darkness coexisting in the world, and the drawing of hands holding a dead dove does not actually conjure up visions of death, but uses this final piteous gesture to hint at the weight of life.
As she sent her images and received the tanka compositions, Uchida realised her artworks and the tanka poems worked well together, as they complemented each other. In some cases, the poems almost helped the artist visualising better the meaning of her works, revealing hidden truths that were invisible to the eye, but that became clearer once they were turned into soft spoken words.
"Everlasting Stars" by Suzume Uchida, Mitsukoshi-Nihonbashi, 7th Floor, 1 Chome-4-1 Nihonbashimuromachi, Chuo City, Tokyo 103-8001, Japan, (until 20th January 2020), from 10.00am to 7.00pm (closing at 6.00pm on 20th January).
Comments