Et nous voici plus bas et plus haut que jamais - 2015

Chiso Bldg, Kyoto
Commissariat : Vincent Romagny

Vue de l’installation

Vue de l’installation

La Grande Serrure

La Grande Serrure - 2011
Robe en deux parties : technique mixte sur tissus, résine, nacres /
Mixed media on fabrics, resin, mother of pearl
ca. 165 x 60 x 5 cm
Papillon et Projection + eau + percée + envers - 2011
Deux parties : peinture et transfert sur tissus / paint and transfer on fabrics
ca. 165 x 70 x 20 cm

Vue de l’installation

Vue de l’installation

Sans Titre (soie)

Sans Titre (soie)
En haut : encre de Chine et œillets en acier / silk (Tamono), India Ink and ironed eyelet
ca. 38 x 130 cm

Reasons to compare kimonos and contemporary artworks are as numerous as reasons to deny this possible convergence. On one side, a kimono is a canvas (Karina Bisch, Anne Laure Sacriste), a work of art to wear (Karina Bisch, Ingrid Luche), an image (Lisa Holzer, Anne Laure Sacriste), and valued by its chamanic / psychological effects (Lisa Holzer, Ingrid Luche). On the other side, kimonos have a strict shape, they are the result of a continuous tradition (since 1555 for Chiso), and collaboratively produced (designers, and until 20 craftmen), whereas contemporary artists’specific tradition consists in inventing new forms and promoting the tradition of the new.

Instead solving this contradictory arguments, I prefered to multiply them in inviting artists to make new works linked to different steps of kimono’s production process and exhibiting them with their classical equivalents. Lisa Holzer and Anne Laure Sacriste produced half scale kimono designs, inkjet printed on silk – just as Chiso’s designers make a first drawing on paper. Karina Bisch and Ingrid Luche have been invited to produce « tamonos », 13 meter long rolls of silk, before they are swen into kimonos, just as 20 craftmen turn Chiso’s drawings into reality.

Karina Bisch and Ingrid Luche’s dresses, as well as this newly produced works, are then exhibited with pieces from Chiso’s archives : 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21rst century kimonos, kosode and works produced by Chiso, for 19th century Japan’s universal exhibition pavilions or older pieces. Surprisingly, processes, shapes, forms and patterns, reveal similarities with contemporary artworks, even before modernity ever emerged in occidental art : interferences of text and images (Lisa Holzer), figures of ornament / deliquescence and monochrome (Anne Laure Sacriste), geometrical patterns combined with animal forms, collage (Karina Bisch), reversal of composition principles (Ingrid Luche). Copy and unicity are undifferentiated as well. « Nihon-ga », Chiso’s historical core still preserved and developped until now in contemporary manners, appears more enlarged than ever expected, once one pay attention to Chiso’s incredible archive.

The desorientation in classical representations, expectations and objects that this exhibition tries to reach perfectly matched french poet Paul Éluard’s 1951 verse « Et nous voici plus bas et plus haut que jamais » (We are lower and higher than ever)[1]. It seems more justified for being turned into the title of this exhibition as it is an excerpt from « Le Phoenix », a love poem describing the birth and rise of the mythological bird in a landscape whose ekphrasis reminds Nihon-ga themes.

Vincent Romagny, Kyoto, Japon, 09.2015