Ota Fine Arts presents the solo exhibition of Takao Minami, his debut in Singapore. The exhibition will feature the artist’s new work, including both double and single-channel video installations, as well as a sculptural installation incorporating the light of a flame and shadow.

From site-specific installation to video, Minami’s work always explores the fundamental elements involved in audio-visual technologies, namely light, colour and sound. This self-reflexivity about the mechanics of video production is rendered with tight attention to composition, the tensions between abstraction and figuration, and the manifold qualities of light itself.

Projected light is conceived as something so basic — even primitive — as the raw light of a flame thrown onto a wall by a magnifying glass. In Fire Symbol, the words for ‘fire’ in ancient writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the Dongba pictograms of the Nakhi people in southern China, are engraved onto the surface of the glass. Although the wick of the candle produces a deceptively simple projective installation, through it Minami illustrates the dual nature of light in our media-saturated world: light as symbol and light as phenomena.

And phenomena is abstracted, and refracted in ever-varying ways, both by the flickering light of the flame and the flashes of core video light in kishi no eizo, Quiet Hole and Difference Between. For Minami, colour is derived from the ‘8-Bit Era’ of retro video games, and these early television and video colour bars inform his choice of palette. His single-channel works kishi no eizo and Quiet Hole are assemblages of neon light, reducing spliced landscapes, stenciled silhouettes of foliage, miniature humans, and other indiscernible shapes to vivid, essential hues. Difference Between is even further pared down to a highly saturated dichromatic schema so that the moving image is balanced between parallel elements — blue water and a bright white sky. The effect additionally fragments hitherto recognisable elements of Minami’s landscapes: waves upon a shore, a palm tree and a traditional Malay house are reduced to their bare outlines.

-Ota Fine Arts Singapore

Image: © Takao Minami
Courtesy of the artist and Ota Fine Arts Singapore