The Architecture of the Perfect Hideout
Anca Verona Mihuleţ ( Independent curator )
The Monkey Business Illusion is the name of one of the most well-known awareness and selective attention experiments in psychology, conducted in the late 1990s by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The subjects of their experiment had to observe a video showing a group of players, some dressed in white, some dressed in black, who were passing basketballs among themselves. The viewers had to count how many times the players dressed in white passed the ball between each other, ignoring the actions of the ones dressed in black. What happened is that many of those viewing the video didn’t notice that at some point, a person wearing a gorilla suit walked into the game, faced the camera and thumped its chest before disappearing from the screen; the gorilla spent nine seconds on the screen, but still, half of the subjects watching the video didn’t see it. For more than twenty years now, this experiment brought up questions regarding visual cognition, meaning what we see, what we don’t see or what we think we see. Generally, we are not fully aware of the context around us, although we have the illusion we do, and our full attention is required in order to be able to recognize the elements shaping our immediate context.
This is the cognitive method Yuya Suzuki has used throughout his artistic career, trying to determine elements that the beholders are usually missing in a given context. In the site-specific installations produced in Berlin back in 2014, each mundane object was placed in conjunction with a photograph, giving the illusion that parallel, distinct spaces were being opened. (fig.1) While running a workshop in a print making studio in Tehran, Suzuki filmed a group of young people who were performing certain imaginative tasks – their anonymous fingers were transformed into puppets or their faces were covered with anodyne masks, with no regard to the pupils’ age and gender. (fig.2)
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Few years ago, in Tate Modern, in a curated section dedicated to “living cities,” various visual records of artists preoccupied with the analysis of contemporary urban structures were on display. The increasing interest and the expansion of theories regarding life and urban thinking have led many artists to pursue an alternative research on what shapes the systems around us and whether humans, buildings, objects and routes can be connected in such a refined way as to complete a functional cityscape.
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Yuya Suzuki has started to work on the ongoing series dedicated to urban shapes during his residency at Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, in 2015. As the city was preparing for the heavy winter, the inhabitants and the local authorities covered trees, bushes and sensitive public furniture with different wrappings made out of plastic and textiles and tied them with strings, creating amorphous shapes that on the white surface generated by the snow looked like art installations. (fig.3) Yuya took pictures of these intriguing shapes and afterwards, in his studio, he drew each one of them on A4 papers, producing a panoptic of fragmented realities extracted from his immediate surroundings. The project started to grow and in 2016 Yuya Suzuki presented the 3D versions of his drawings in the Sapporo Station underground passage, bringing the unclassified shapes back into the public realm. (fig.4) In a combinatory process, he used materials and textures assumed from the daily living to construct a simulacra of a temporary reality. Yuya continued to present his drawings and objects in Nagoya, Seoul, Tainan and Beijing throughout the following years, extending his urban narrative. The haptic installations developed in Tainan, primarily dedicated to children (fig.5) or the large scale objects presented in Beijing and inspired by readymades the artist discovered on the old alleys of the city complete a collection of imagined urban fragments, which have an intricate ability to synthesize and even reproduce space, memory and snippets of time.
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The procedures Yuya Suzuki employs have come as a pretext to revisit an older writing of Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images and The Precession of Simulacra, where the French philosopher explains the difference between simulation and representation. Representation, he says, “starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent […]; simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reverence. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.” Baudrillard also talks about the four successive phases of an image. Yuya Suzuki’s approach responds to the third phase, meaning that the images that he creates mask the absence of a basic reality, playing the role of an appearance, “of the order of sorcery.” Bearing in mind Baudrillard’s theory, Yuya’s drawings become signs and these signs have the capacity to dissimulate a given reality filtered by the artist and rendered in a new form which encapsulates “truth and secrecy,” but also memory and remembrance.
The drawings that Yuya exhibits enter the regime of simulation, becoming “signs of reality,” while the exhibition itself becomes a simulacra of the urban strata the artist is analyzing. To continue the discussion referring to Baudrillard, Yuya Suzuki uses the process of drawing to determine a strategy of the real, without isolating the implications of simulation. For Yuya, simulation is not a way of attainting power, but it is a manifestation of resilience and a reaction to the new places he discovers or that he temporarily inhabits. Even more so, simulation comes as a consequence of his repetitive strolling around these places.
In matters of artistic method, apart from working with cognitive strategies and simulation, Suzuki reproduces reality in an almost compulsive way, reclaiming all the phases of the elements he studies. Hidden architectural formations, forgotten and useless objects or heterotopias can’t escape his inquisitive eye which scans with patience wide areas of a city. We, as viewers are disarmed by the fact that we can’t always identify the depicted object or structure, although it is extracted from our own surroundings, but on the other side, we are dwelled upon imagining the unknown. This is the particular moment when Yuya Suzuki embraces abstraction, to which he adds a dose of fantasy and humor.
[This is an adapted version of a text initially included in archegraph_study, Yuya Suzuki’s catalogue published by salon cojica in 2017.]