The Birth of Seeing   Tomoko Konoike

The visual-focused values that it has been the privilege of art to present to the world in the past, and the global structures of culture and economy, are entering a period of tectonic shift on a global scale. Tomoko Konoike has worked across a variety of familiar media, including animation, painting, picture books, sculpture, handicrafts, fairy tales, and songs, while traveling to present her works alongside specific landscapes or specific seasons. Since the start of her career, one common and ongoing theme in all her work has been to fundamentally question the nature of art.
For this exhibition, she has given the name “the Birth of Seeing” to the surprise of encountering the world in a newborn body. Her audience sees not with their eyes, but with their hands, nose, ears; with gravity, and with their breath, opening a new passage between the solid construct of the museum and the estranged natural world. Her new animal droppings model and leather patched "Leather Black Kite" coexist alongside the human-leavings of the museum collection. She has also created a spot called an “intertidal zone”―a beach where the waves of life lap, connecting the museum to Oshima Island across the sea. A variety of artwork washes over the beach like waves, including paintings from the Kinyokai art club at Kikuchi Keifuen in Kumamoto, Isamu Wakayabashi’s, "Model for the Green Constellation" and the handcrafted "The Storytelling Table Runner Project". With different time, light, and language, the audience―and the artist, too―are more than just human.