© SAWA Hiraki

airliner

ArtistSAWA Hiraki
Year2003
Material/ TechniqueDVD
Size/ Duration3 min.
Copyright Notice© SAWA Hiraki
Year of acquisition/ donation2005
DescriptionBorn in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan in 1977. Lives and works in London, UK.

While at university, Sawa Hiraki produced works including sculptures that one could physically enter, later going on to make video works using computers. He extracts scenes from footage of his own apartment as well as of scenery from around the world, reconstructs them, and, using a computer, superimposes photographs of model airplanes, children’s rocking horses, birds, shadows, and the like to create a different space-time. This form of expression, which has a palpable warmth on account of the lowtech methods employed, projects an airiness and lightness as well as a unique eccentricity. In recent years a more sculptural spatial composition can be detected in Sawa’s work, including spatial composition in which a sculptural approach has been adopted in the arrangement of the videos, and the juxtapositioning of objects and videos, for example.

In his early works, Sawa depicted the polarity of the ordinary and the extraordinary in videos shot in the most ordinary and private of spaces in the form of the apartment in which he lived. In "spotter", in which the outside world intrudes into private space, airplanes, which enable people to fly all over the world in a short space of time, invade Sawa’s room and float around, while groups of people in different locations around the room follow their movements with binoculars and so on as they fly back and forth overhead. In "elsewhere", which depicts the extraordinary quietly unfolding in the midst of the ordinary, a kettle, a toilet paper roll, a shampoo bottle and other everyday items sprout legs and begin to wander around Sawa’s apartment. For the movement of the legs, Sawa used photographs originally used in chronophotography, a technique developed at the end of the 19th century before the invention of cinematography in which the body was photographed continuously in an attempt to analyze scientifically the movement of the human body. In "airliner", Sawa’s style of assimilating the outside world from his own perspective by drawing it into individual space is expressed in the even smaller world of a book. The card-flipping cartoon technique in which the airplanes look like they are moving as the pages are turned calls to mind the origins of cinematography, while the endless repetition of the page-turning movement gives the piece a sense of perpetuity.

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