Today we can access the other side of the world instantaneously on the Internet with just the click of a button. Sometimes this may cause us to lose our bearings. On screens in PC games we find a world created using CG (computer graphics). We can move around in a CG world more freely than in the real world. The exhibition entitled Shinchika held in the gallery, Ota Fine Arts, in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, made me want to consider these virtual spaces, such as the CG world. This was the exhibition of the unit, Shinchika, consisting of five members, namely, Tsuyoshi Hisakado, Yosuke Fujino, Rinshiro Fujiki, Shinpei Yoshikawa and Toki Katsumura. Shinchika has developed various kinds of activities, including production of graphic and film works, as well as composing music.

    Immediately after getting off the elevator on the fourth floor at the gallery, I heard in the darkness the sound of the music titled “S-curve” composed by Shinchika. The digitally processed sounds and the interesting rhythms of the music were very comfortable. In this gallery, there was no entrance door. Accordingly, viewers were made to step into the world of the exhibition rather abruptly shortly after reaching the venue.
    A number of mobiles attached with shining reflectors (or reflection boards) for automobiles were hung down from the ceiling. A light was shining on these small circular reflectors. Viewed from a distance, you could see that something that looked like a particle of light was wavering in the air. Upon closer examination, I noticed it was generated from the movement of the boards. The shining reflectors even made me imagine pictures of cars. They seemed to be similar to fragmentary memories, such as those of acquaintances whose voices I remembered though I could not bring back their faces. Or something like the memory of a coffee shop in which I could remember the design of the coffee cup more intensely than the actual taste of the coffee which I drank at the shop. The details of such reflectors and their movements evoked various memories in me. Like the wavering reflectors making me recall memories of some past time, animations were projected on the wall of the back of the exhibition room [fig. 1].
    The film work named “yama no michi”(A Road in the Mountains) (9 min. 21 sec., 2009) is of the story of a young man and a woman climbing a mountain by car. Though some photographed images were included in the film, it was mostly composed of handwritten-like animations, 3D-CGs , and flat icons which I’m sure would be familiar with people who enjoyed playing computer games in the 1980s when “digital” things first came to be the dominant trend in Japan [fig. 2 and 3]. In the storyline, there was something in common among places where the main characters appeared and things they held in their hands. For instance, they were in a car, a train and a subway station, and there were also flashbacks to a refrigerator. Then they were on a mountain, holding a flashlight from which the dry-cell batteries had fallen out of. You may perhaps feel that there is no relationship between the things above-mentioned, but what they have in common is that they are associated with a “cave” in contemporary Japan. “Caves” have been used in many stories to represent settings isolated from this world and places that make us expect that something new will happen. Despite this, in the story, the characters kept moving in spite of being obsessed with something like a cave. Sometimes only the background shifted while there was no change of characters. It was therefore difficult for us to realize where the characters were. Even a premise - the meaning of the word, “real” - was tactfully dodged in the story by utilizing animations and digital images without using live-action film. In addition, focusing on the story, the main characters - the man and the woman - were both in their own extremely individual worlds composed of only two persons, namely, “you” and “I”. We were lulled into an illusion that we were viewing memories of one of characters, “I”.
    Nevertheless, in the end, the setting of the story changed from an individually closed space to an open world. It shifted from a womb-like cave to a landscape in which a mountain similar to Mt. Fuji could be seen erupting in the distance. In the last scene of the film, a radio broadcast conveying the beginning of a peaceful new day was used as background music and there was the flow of the “present” time in the story. Before I knew it, the characters had disappeared from the picture. The focus changed from the characters to a distant view in which a town landscape could be seen spreading out from the foot of the mountain. The view was similar to the world seen through the eyes of newborn babies.

In the field of comics, light novels and animation in Japan today there is a storyline trend called “sekai-kei”. In “sekai-kei” (literally, “world”) stories an individual story concerning a man and a woman is casually connected with a theme on the continuation of the entire world. There is of course no strict definition of this concept since it was derived from the Internet, but it has been covered in several books written by professionals, including for example, Hiroki Azuma, Extraordinary Professor, Center for the Study of World Civilizations, Tokyo Institute of Technology, who critiquied this genre from his perspective in the field of modern thought and formative culture, as well as Tsunehiro Uno, the organizer of the planned unit, “Dainiji Wakusei Kaihatsu Iinkai”, (literally “The Committee for the Development of Planet No. 2) a critic in the field of postwar literature and communication. Some critics see the “sekai-kei” genre as a problematic concept in that it includes a trivialized perspective and a weak world view, while others value it for its sensitive psychological descriptions of its characters. Indeed, “yama no michi” was apparently created with this “sekai-kei” trend in mind. However, in the story, there was no description of the feelings and thoughts of the characters, only the setting of characters and a storyline which were created under the concept of “sekai-kei”. Furthermore, at the end of the story, the characters disappear from the picture plane. In that instant, the story deviates from the “sekai-kei” category. Viewers are then forced to look at the world in the story from their own perspective and not that of the characters. The film did not end with a story of a man and a woman living only in the world of the story. It could be called a device providing viewers with the first opportunity to look at the wide world outside of themselves. This could be the reason it left me with a vivid impression of the warehouses and the town in this world after returning to the ground floor and leaving the venue.
    This exhibition epitomized various kinds of things which seemed to be familiar to some people, particularly those living in Japan who are used to enjoying anime, using personal computers and the Internet culture over the last thirty years. As a result of the exhibition, we could experience the fun of actually visiting the gallery and viewing the exhibits in the same period as that of this exhibition. It is also interesting to imagine how this exhibition would be evaluated overseas and how it will be interpreted in the century ahead. Like the shining reflectors evoking our dim memories (even though they did not remind us of overall pictures of automobiles), the after-images of the creations shown in this exhibition made me expect that they would be come back to me again some years from now in the future.
(Translated by Nozomi Nakayama)