I visited Shinya Azuma’s solo exhibition “Teleportation: Zanarkand ⇆ Restroom.”
The venue is the 3rd Floor of rin art association, an art space near Takasaki Station.
I often take up, as my subject matter, images accumulated in my head that originate from different contexts (for example, footage of war streaming out of the television, works by masters seen at a museum, screens of video games, my slack body reflected in the mirror, etc.).
The act of summoning those images into the arena of painting is not only a re-tracing of the contours of the world I am seeing, but is also close to the associative game of rhymes and wordplay in HIP-HOP, where new meaning is given by using things that belong to entirely different contexts. (I don’t actually listen to much HIP-HOP, though…)
The title “Teleportation: Zanarkand ⇆ Restroom” is one I came up with while wondering whether there was any phrase that could describe the work I make.
Zanarkand is the name of an otherworldly place that appears in the TV game Final Fantasy X. And the restroom — the toilet — is an extremely personal space in which one excretes waste from one’s body.
The way of instantly moving back and forth across the distance between these two words is, I think, what painting is for me.Shinya Azuma
