The Walls of Culture
Walking the Wall I
If culture is seen as an interface between our psychology and environment, then our own fragility is obvious. Our realities are illusions and our thoughts are pieces on a gossamer chessboard.
Walking the Wall II
In the juxtaposition of forms, which is Takayama’s hallmark, we see the solid chess pieces on milky white paths. They travel nowhere but within themselves.
Walking the Wall III
And are these walls so very certain, these walls of culture. In her forms the artist has captured vagueness as structural certainty. Where does one fold of reality end and the other begin?
Walking the Wall IV
In this piece Takayama continues her narrative of juxtaposition and creates familiarities where none should really exist. We are all walking the walls of our cultures.
Ziggurat of Dreams I
Since the Sumerian City States we have been living a culture of urban settlement. In this evolution of society we build our power in the highest places. We dream beyond ourselves.
Ziggurat of Dreams II
No matter how we colour those dreams they are but momentary vanities in the face of the eternal. Our layers of power will become layers of archaeology in time.
Ziggurat of Dreams III
In this work Takayama places fixed lines on flowing curves. In bleached bone white she seeks to disguise detail and colour, she hides away meaning in subtlety.
Ziggurat of Dreams IV
Our dreams are built on seemingly hard, substantive realities but when we probe deeper we find only our own perceptions. Our cities, our ziggurats, are as transient as our dreams.
The City of Man I
Men shape things within the fantasies of their own desires. Male culture is dominated by their need to copulate. Everything the adult male does is an erection of one sort or another.
The City of Man II
The City of Man is a competitive structure, rude with the penetrating semen of his architectures. He inserts his influence in everything without consideration of ‘other’.
The City of Man III
At the root of the City of Man is the desperate need for power. No man wants to be without power. In the Walls of his Culture, man dominates himself.
The City of Man IV
Takayama’s final piece is of itself a juxtaposition to the other works in this series. She takes the dominate female lines of curves, the bone white and turns it into a male pink phallus. On this towering form her sharp commentary stands, pricking the heavens.
The Walls of Culture sculpture series by Akane Takayama is a juxtaposition of form and character; her use of form, line and structure in a series produced in 2002. These were centre pieces of her solo exhibition at Cafe Gallery Projects (one of London’s public funded galleries) in Southwark, 2003.
In Walking the Wall we see the convolutions of form reminiscent of the shape of the brain. Set upon the ridges Takayama placed chess pieces from a classic set; they add movement to the work even whilst immobile. Within the folds of the structure appear shadows of blue grey creating a palette of colour purely by use of light rather than pigment. On the whole, the image is mesmerising and draws the eye to investigate the spaces between the folds.
In her use of juxtaposition, Takayama creates a form which flows and travels without distinct animation, a movement produced by geometry and a whiteness preventing the observation of any disturbance. Onto this form and in context with it she works into place the chess pieces, firm, solid, distinctive points in time, statements of an artefact of culture which originated in the Far East to be then interpreted in time and place by other cultures. One concept of fluidity another of definition, juxtaposed and brought together in harmony.
In this series, Takayama displays her relationship within her life with changing cultures. Being Japanese but living in the UK she has experienced the walls which culture can present to the individual life. Hierarchy and prejudice are as much a part of the challenge a newcomer faces, in any culture, as language and climate. In her art, she seeks to express some of this experience and even question the status and legitimacy of the multicultural project.
