Levitrope © Yoichi Ochiai, Courtesy of HiRAO INC.

“I’ve always said that this Levitrope is a camera. That is particularly clear in this exhibition. The spheres capture the whole scenery around them, removing the significance from the scenery. In other words, they cut out the scenery materially. It’s very rare to have the opportunity to see that at such close quarters,” explains Ochiai.

Silver Floats © Yoichi Ochiai, Courtesy of HiRAO INC.

The waveform silver sculptures are known as “Silver Floats”, which have a number of objects, each modeled on waveforms of different frequencies, hovering and rotating. “It is more abstract, with a lot of noise. The design is an attempt to have each of the individual objects capture the background and convert it for use as shakei, or borrowed scenery. With that approach, binocular parallax is lost from the captured view of the exhibition, which then appears as if it were in the distance, seemingly converted to two dimensions instead of three. The work is consequently one where the objects assimilate with the images of the background, so that materiality is lost from the objects,” added Ochiai.

Morpho Scenery © Yoichi Ochiai, Courtesy of HiRAO INC.

The last room at the back of the exhibit had a big window towards Omotesando. This was in fact not a mere coincidence but a manifesto Dr. Ochiai wanted to focus upon. The concept of Nature has changed; it is not the same for us as it was when humans emerged back in prehistory. Dr. Ochiai is aware of it. The street of Omotesando in this case is used by the artist as a representation of the industrial society vernacular. In the middle of the room a large magnifying glass pointed towards the big window helped to enhance the idea for the visitor.  This installation’s name is “Morpho Scenery”, which extracts a 2-dimensional portion of the street reflected in the lens, that again refers to Ochiai’s important concept of “borrowed scenery”.

Yoichi Ochiai “Beauty of Natural Resolution ∽ End to End, Transformation of Material Things ∽ Digital Nature”
Date: April 20th – June 28th, 2018
Opening hours: 11:00 – 20:00 
Place: EYE OF GYRE
Address: 3F GYRE, 5-10-1 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Shibuya, Tokyo
Tel: 03-3498-6990 (GYRE)
Organizer: GYRE 
Support: HiRAO INC.
https://gyre-omotesando.com