How do you reconceive yourself in a society that has failed you?
My practice explores the reckoning of self-conception in the postwar youth subculture. Between the familiar and the unnerving, the works examine the turbulence of the self and its desire in this erotic, physical, and self-destructive subculture.
Hand-tied knots, leather, broken in like an animal, and the fumes of gasoline. The materiality of the works dwells on intimacy and vulnerability, where the boundary between the Self and the Other cannot be clearly defined nor enforced. With every contact, intrusion, and trespass, the Other invades the boundary and disturbs the Self, imposing its will physically.
The materials, as much as they are shaped, bound and held together, will eventually fall apart, or they were preconditioned to fail, like the aetheroleum slowly eating away at the petroleum-based polymers. The process of entropy, intrinsic to the works, reinforces the true nature of desire -the complete annihilation of the Self as it merges with the Other. It is in this destruction of the boundary that defines the Self that erotic power achieves, paradoxically, an antidote to death. If war is about the political and military destruction of the Other, then postwar youth subculture inverted this dynamic and demanded the destruction of the nationalistic, ethnic, and gendered contours that delineated the Self from the Other. Desire is not a regression to the primal but a break towards the conceivable.
Playing now:
-Making of Cyborg ~~~Kenji Kawai
-Making of Cyborg ~~~Kenji Kawai