Ota Fine Arts is delighted to present new work by Japanese performance, sound and installation artist Umeda Tetsuya, in his first solo exhibition in Singapore entitled “Hotel New Osorezan”. Umeda’s experimental site-specific work explores our fundamental environment of nature, sound, light, energies from atmospheric and water pressure, gravity, and electrical currents. His eccentric, almost scientific exploration of these media is further informed by everyday spaces and quotidian consumer products and electronics.

Written in Japanese characters as “恐山”, Osorezan is a great mountain in Northern Japan that remains relatively untouched, retaining its pristine nature. Deeply revered for being sacred ground, people have attached cultural meanings and associations to this mountain, adding further significance to its existence. Impressed by the seemingly fragile yet still strongly rooted balance between humans, their natural environment and man-made structures, Umeda hopes to bring his own impressions of such a natural phenomenon – Mount Osorezan – into the space of the gallery.

Transforming and enabling the sonic, kinetic and spatial potentials of the white cube gallery, Umeda presents “Hotel New Osorezan”. A sort of imaginary hotel, this temporary and artificial living space has its own unique elements, forces, systems and meanings.

The artist frequently works from ideas and inventions he posits directly from the exhibition space at hand, stripping it of ornament or conventional design, and opening up to inspection the elaborate systems and dimensions that are hidden within its walls, ceiling ducts, wiring, and so on. Within the gallery, one is also likely to encounter daily tools or found objects that are rearranged by Umeda and reconstituted in unexpected ways so that the installation is tightly orchestrated – as it were – by chance, improvisation or even chaos. These become incorporated into the artist’s own causal, but nonetheless unpredictable and elaborate systems.

“Hotel New Osorezan” poses an opportunity for Umeda’s audience to ponder new, coincidental discoveries within a range of discrete phenomena, and to think of the “art space” in an entirely different way.

Photo by: Kiyo Akamatsu, Image: © Umeda Tetsuya, Ota Fine Arts