Yasui Tomotaka is a promising young Japanese sculptor who lives and works in Tokyo. Like fellow artists of his generation, he, too, is responding to the dichotomy of charm and hostility felt in the big metropolis, and to the penetration of Western culture into daily life in Japan. However, unlike many of his peers, he has not adopted manga and anime as his sources of inspiration, and uses traditional, time-consuming lacquer process instead to create his unique naturalistic sculptures.
Yasui’s sculptures are often based on people, animals and objects from his immediate surroundings. The viewer is struck by the choice to present these sometimes intimate sculptures frozen and motionless, almost withdrawn, with silence as their central feature.
Even the hands, which Yasui considers most expressive, are hidden in the extra-long sleeves. The figures are highly stylized, and made with notably simple lines. On the one hand, the sculpture is presented as a single mass that has little involvement with space. On the other hand, the features and the technique of the demanding lacquer work exude finesse and grace.
Gazing at the sealed expressions characteristic of Yasui’s figures, the spectator is pushed to speculate on the range of causes and feelings leading to such closure. As Susan Sontag has written, “Silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence.” (Sontag, Susan, The Aesthetics of Silence.)
Excerpt from The Jerusalem Center of Visual Arts
