Invisible Cities

The title of this exhibition comes from Italo Calvino’s novel, which uses a unique text structure to convey the idea of multiple fabricated cities. Each city is imaginatively described as a separate place by a character named Marco Polo, a guest at Kublai Khan’s court. Each of the separately named cities in the book is actually a narrative of Venice. In this way, Calvino was clairvoyant about the fragmented and multiple nature of supposedly coherent cities. We thought about the keyword “virtual city,” a term we use to understand the phenomenon of communities that inhabit meta, fragmented or virtual spaces that transcend our geographical understanding of place, or exist as a psychological extension. 

This exhibition at Hagiso Cultural Facility brings together strands of work that I am working on at Tokyo National University of Arts. Including urban migratory plant life that inhabits a kind of citizenship. These works began with drawings of the weeds along the Sumidagawa River, a former Edo Period port of entry for goods and ideas, now replaced by a highway. These sets of drawings entangle in new organic ways through encounters with the studio and with printmaking mediums. Sometimes these works find a resting form in the medium of colorful mokuhanga. At other times the weeds—still moving and migrating—continue to resist the idea of a fixed or final format. 

This is a two person exhibition with Albert Yonathan Setyawan who primarily works with ceramics, a medium he prefers for its ubiquitous presence in daily life and its social, cultural and historical associations. Over the years he has been exploring other mediums as well such as drawing and performance art.

For this exhibition, Setyawan contemplated the poetic aspects of living spaces as part of the experience of being in a city. He sees the interiors of buildings, such as staircases, windows, doors, ceilings, or any other ordinary parts of a house as something that could evoke personal and intimate memories. Using ceramics and drawings Setyawan created a series of geometric planes consisting of repeated views of the same interior space. Each of these “panopticon” planes are meticulously arranged to create a sense of unity but at the same time also produce a dizzying effect. Due to their multiple perspectives, no single part of them serves as the focal point or the center of attention. Every part of the composition is drawn in exactly the same size which contradicts its own perspective. Setyawan’s works reflect on the idea that our ordinary living spaces are not static entities but organic and fluid extensions of our physical and psychological existence.