Exhibition | Material & Memory by Yohei Nishimura

A kiln can turn clay into a solid object in the merest sliver of time that it takes Earth’s geological processes to do the same thing. With this as his starting point, Japanese artist Yohei Nishimura uses his kiln to remove objects such as books or fruit from the time stream entirely. By burning away the chaff of the fruit flesh, he leaves us with the concept of the object he started with. We’re left with the shape of the kiwi, an idea; the fruit itself has gone Somewhere Else.

Nishimura says his exhibition Material & Memory at New York’s Cavin-Morris Gallery (April 11 – May 12, 2013) was inspired by thousand-year-old grains of carbonized rice he saw while visiting a museum. “It fascinated me that even after thousands of years, organic material such as rice had continued to exist,” he said.

Nishimura, who had previously been exposing books to the fires of a kiln, decided to subject fruit to the same process. He placed kiwis, pears, or apples inside enamel bowls and fired both of them together. He was left with ashy-looking objects that retain the shape of fruit. The fruits scored each bowl with a series of unique lines, a byproduct of the firing process through which they entered the world of ideas. He suspended each bowl above the floor of the gallery on barely-visible wires. These concepts that Nishimura created float, perhaps to further suggest that they exist separate from the material world. The exhibition notes state that these bowls are lit from above and the shadows on the floor below are evocative of lunar phases.

Nishimura graduated from the Arts Department of Tokyo University of Education and has been a teacher at the Chiba School for the Blind, where he teaches children to make three-dimensional art using modeling clay. He received the Foreign Minister Prize in the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition in 1977. He has works on permanent display at the Museum of Decorative Arts and the National Museum of Ceramic-Sèvres, both in Paris; at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum; and at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Today he is a teacher at Japan Women’s University.

Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.

Above image: Installation view of Yohei Nishimura’s Material & Memory. Works from 2012-2013. Fired enamel bowls with apples, pears or kiwis. Courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.

A video tour of Yohei Nishimura’s Material & Memory at Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York(April 11 – May 12, 2013). Installation video courtesy of ODelle Abney.

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Visit Yohei Nishimura’s page at Cavin-Morris Gallery

Visit the Material and Memory Catalog

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