Pearl farming industry in Omura Bay, Nagasaki Prefecture. In order to stabilize its value and distribute as a uniform industrial product, pearls have been bleached, its sphere polished, and measured in size to determine its rank during the distribution process. However, a pearl is actually the opposite of being uniform; Each is a gift of life born from a mother shell, the Akoya shellfish. The beauty in its uniqueness is similar to that of individual people. It truly embodies the beauty of diversity and individuality. That is, if it derives from natural diversity, instead of industrial uniformity, when brought into society. Within a single atmosphere, this exhibition aims to create time that has not been used during this history.

Soft light falls in an atmosphere that is loosely separated from the outside world by organdy.
The atmosphere portrays a mother’s womb; In it dwells air, presence, sounds, and life, all holding its independent values.

The single thread that supports the weight of a pearl expresses the time axis of the life of each pearl. Each thread sways in the natural breeze of its atmosphere and interacts with each other’s lives, just like the life of us humans.

Nameless Portrait

In the X, Y, and Z axes that make up this world, Y-axis exist from gravity. If we release the Y-axis from the gravity, then what kind of recognition will be born ? What kind of relationship and tale will create on three equivalent and balanced axes? A composition for doubting the Y axis backed by absolute trust such as the sea, the ground, and stars. I re-evaluated these three axes, as an absolute concept in this relative world.

UNIT FOR Y-AXIS

UNIT FOR Y-AXIS No.1

How will our consumption look when seen from the perspective of people in the future with different values?
The inspiration for this piece started from that simple question.

This piece is a sculpture made by sand.
The Channel No°5 is made of sand and the logo mark is in acrylic.

The symbol of consumption is detached from the functional material,
and the two elements are crafted from differing materials and given a different sense of time.

The concept is deconstructed and rebuilt from two materials in different times.

We have icon preferences, these icons are a part of our lives, and we consume them.
In this sense, the work is like a letter from the future to all of us living in the world right now.

Fossils from the future ＃02 “Channel No°5”

How will our consumption look when seen from the perspective of people in the future with different values?
The inspiration for this piece started from that simple question.

Within the lifestyle of the artist, who grew up in the midst of Tokyo street culture,
Nike sneakers were a constant and absolute iconic presence.

This piece is a sneaker sculpted in sand.
The Nike Air Jordan 1 is made of sand and the logo mark is in acrylic.

The symbol of consumption is detached from the functional material,
and the two elements are crafted from differing materials and given a different sense of time.

The concept is deconstructed and rebuilt from two materials in different times.

We have icon preferences, these icons are a part of our lives, and we consume them.
In this sense, the work is like a letter from the future to all of us living in the world right now.

 

WHAT HE MADE
“Fossils from the future” is the title of a series of works by Seitaro Yamazaki. The series pursues the characteristics of “symbols” in the consumer society, which have been prevailing since late 20th century until today, through the aspect of “time”.

The first work in the series, “#01 Nike Air Jordan 1”, consists of a paint-coated sneaker made of casting sand and transparent acrylic resin featuring a cross section in the shape of Nike’s “Swoosh Logo”, fragments of the casting sand generated in the sneaker shaping process, and the 3D printing modelling data.

Among the three support components of the work, casting sand and acrylic resin have been respectively and constantly undergoing chemical transformation process through interactions with their surrounding environment in their own time axes. Thus, the combination of timelines of the three support media is always different. That said, the modeling data can produce something “extremely similar” to the acrylic resin part as an replacement.

The part featuring the cross section of the Swoosh Logo shape is thicker by 20mm than the sneaker itself. The part can be inserted up to whatever depth the artist likes. Therefore, how the acrylic part looks totally depends on where the viewer stands.

 
WHY HE MADE
As the art director of a design firm, Seitaro Yamazaki faces myriad “symbols” every day.
Some of such “symbols” are extremely localized, while others are acknowledged literally all over the world. As these symbols go around through exchanges and distribution channels among people, they acquire positive or negative connotations as attributions. Some symbols occasionally create massive monetary flow, induce powerful emotions, unite people, or divide population.

The dynamic and performative characteristics of “symbols” in today’s business are not something that can be affirmed or denied in their entirety. However, their powerful presence in the age we live is undeniable, and we have no other choice than to always face them. 

Then, if we could glance back upon our age from the distant future, how does our relationship with “icons/symbols” look like? Will it be the same as how we presently see “icons/symbols”? To address this question, this work combines three materials to express “Swoosh Logo”, one of the epitomes of our age.

“#01 Nike Air Jordan 1” juxtaposes three support media in different time axes – casting sand, acrylic resin, and digital data – to visualize the multiple flows of time surrounding “Swoosh Logo”, an “icon/symbol”. The connotations attributed to “Swoosh Logo” are also undergoing permanent transitions through the flow of information on Internet.

In other words, “icons/symbols” manifest themselves from the numerous crisscrossing flows with a certain order. They do not deliberately arrive from a known origin – rather, they spontaneously emerge in and disappear from the site of consumption where we all belong.

While casting sand is massively in use on a daily basis as the material of industrial products, it never shows itself in our daily consumer life. The material momentarily emerges in random places and then disappears, just like the negative image of today’s consumer society.

Acrylic resin, on the other hand, is renowned among various plastics particularly for its transparency, weathering resistance, and shock resistance, playing conspicuous part in our consumptive life. Finally, digital data is an intangible material, while it functions as the overwhelming driving force of the consumer society. The three media supporting “#01 Nike Air Jordan 1” were selected from three realms of “things” that support our consumer activities.

Fossils from the future ＃01 “Nike AIR JORDAN 1”

“Kintsugi” is a technique used in Japan for repairing broken vessels.
Lacquer and metal are used to join breaks in vessels and fill up chipped places.

Vessels are a crystallization of functional beauty that draw close to our lives.
“Kintsugi” connects our feelings for those vessels with the future.

It is nothing other than wrapping time called feelings around something which has value, so to speak, and making that thing even more valuable.

The concept termed “wabi-sabi”, which is peculiar to Japan, and is similar to, yet different from, Western modernism.
The big factor encompassed by this minimal beauty is time.

The basis of this work is a panel made while mixing resin, wax, and pigment, which are materials which have different time axes – that is, different congealing points and melting points.

The panel’s broken lines, full of unpredictability, are displayed and repaired using “kintsugi”.

Breaking a mere worthless thing which does not involve time in our lives, and on the other hand, affirming that temporality only, and connecting it with the future.

This is an endeavor which uses time to give value to something which at first glance has no value, and it is a crystallization of worthless time.

 

What He Made

“Crystallization of Worthless Time” is a work produced by Seitaro Yamazaki to discuss Kintsugi (golden joinery) as a Japanese traditional technique to repair pottery can be related to what kinds of times.

\What make up the picture are wax, epoxy resin, pigment, lacquer, and gold.
Both wax and epoxy resin being the support media of this work can be liquid, solid or gas, but the conditions for these phase transitions being generated are totally different and these two materials are in different time axes thermally.
Exactly because in different time axes, cracks will be found in these two. What fills such cracks is Kintsugi using lacquer and gold.

Kintsugi that is supposed to have been called out for anchoring two separating times will, precisely because it is Kintsugi, create a unique time in which Kintsugi is a scenery in itself.

The way how these materials exist are also the allegorical meaning of a phenomenon where individuals are forced to live several time phases in today’s society. We have to live at least both the time phases of digital space and our own body concurrently, which will inevitably cause a time fracture within an individual. However, when something which can flexibly join such a fractured surface has been brought about, more than one time phase and their joint area within an individual may on the whole produce forms, colors and beauty unique to him or her.

 

Why He Made

Seitaro Yamazaki has been consistently working on the visualization of multiple times existing (or may exist or may have existed) in the world we live in and examining how such time groups can be related with each other.

What Seitaro Yamazaki addressed in “Crystallization of Worthless Time” was the process to examine the bandwidth of time groups which can be generated by a craftwork repair technique called Kintsugi that has been developed in the islands of Japan.

Kintsugi was originally designed and has been developed as a technique to repair damaged pottery and restore their functions and therefore its basic role was to join the “time before being damaged” and the “time after being damaged” by the “restoration and maintenance of functions”. Through the appearance of the time being the functions of pottery at a place discontinued due to the damage and by restoring the functions of pottery, Kintsugi produces new times and beauty values thereafter. What Kintsugi is requiring as the joint surface for times is a nominal scale to make a distinction between functioning and not functioning as pottery.

Meanwhile, what Kintsugi is joining in this work is a picture with no function or value in itself which has appeared in this world with carrying two time axes at the same time but is destined to break apart early. Since this picture does not have a function, unlike Kintsugi for pottery, there is no way to do Kintsugi for joining times before and after.

However, in parallel, by joying through Kintsugi two times separating from each other, it becomes possible to produce new times and beauty values not being exposed to a nominal scale of functions.

How He Made

Seitaro Yamazaki first created the picture by pouring into a form the mixture of wax, pigment and epoxy resin and then dried it at the point when a satisfactory texture was obtained. Because wax and plastic cannot be chemically bound through such a method and their toughness and malleability differ, unexpectedly shaped cracks will be generated on the picture as being dried. Further, after fracturing the picture as it was by throwing it at the floor, he filled kokuso lacquer in the fractures surface and dropped golden powder on it – so-called Kintsugi -, which is how this work has been produced. A big Kintsugi displayed in the upper right corner of the picture is a part filled with fragments lost when the picture was fractured.

Crystallization of worthless time

Every piece of music has a melody. Between the grains of sound making the melody, there is an infinite abyss of sound. The world of sound that exists between the grains and cannot be captured in a notation. The infinite world of sound existing between the grains is dynamically visualized by a digital program. The fluid marbling, like a metronome, has a constant velocity, but its scale and color keep changing. The mysterious patterns on the black screen are pieces of visualized music extracted through a specific program. There is no same shape in any music or repetition of any sound. This is a unique piece of sound, a world of sounds that have failed to become sound.

 

What He Made
 “Music for Margin” is a series of works by Seitaro Yamazaki, who launched the project to seek possibilities to express the relationship of “sound” and “(overlapping, folded, or blended) multiple time, existing within possibilities”.

 “Music for Margin #1” is a visual artwork developed on the same time axis as “Counterpoint”, four music pieces by Steve Reich. In this work, the center screen of the three screens represents the time axis, which Counterpoint presently follows, while the two screens on the left and the right represent the fragments of the tiniest time which “might have existed there”.

 The combination of “fragments of sound that might have existed” projected on the screens on two sides is programmed to complete one cycle exactly in 24 hours based on the clock within the computer running the program, which does not precisely match any of the apparent solar time, International Atomic Time, or Coordinated Universal Time.

 

Why He Made
Throughout his artistic career, Seitaro Yamazaki has pursued visualization of myriad “expressions that might have been possible or time that might have existed” but had “vanished away without being selected for some reasons”. Theoretically, however, these attempts are destined to end up in failure, because the “expression” or “time” that has been given a shape by Yamazaki inevitably becomes chosen and existing. Works by Seitaro Yamazaki are traces of myriad possibilities that are left through various measures in the destined failure.

 “Music for Margin #1” consists of the extracts of “fragments of sound that might have existed” and “realized sound” from the myriad sound creatable from the music sheet of “Counterpoint”, which are aligned within a single time axis. Through the compilation, we can experience Reich’s “Counterpoint” being realized here and now and the unrealized “Counterpoint” in the counterpoint structure of two time axes.

The two time axes featured here are somewhat like an illusion, like the time only existing in each digital devices we personally own, as they do not precisely match the flow of time, which the audience is presently in, or the celestial motions or the global time conceptually shared among the presently existing humans. This illusional time is a manifestation of a will of the one who expresses and at the same time proves the eternal mismatch between such manifestation and the great nature in its element.

 

How He Made
Using a JavaScript program, the work generates spectrograms of the sound source and magnifies their details to the limit. None of the generated figures have the same shape. These figures are picked up and projected on the side screens.

The central screen features figures generated from the sound of the currently playing music. Through the contrast with the microscopic figures projected on the side screens, each screen expresses “parts and the whole”.

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SEITARO YAMAZAKI