beautiful town(plenty of empty)

Paradoxical Poesy 

Itaru Hirano, 

Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama

Mariko Asai’s artistic expressions take diverse forms, such as drawings, three-dimensional works, photographs, film and installations and so forth. Her works have certain sense of aesthetics in common. It is like a poesy that paradoxically appears in hackneyed, empty subjects. Whereas many of her creations are based on daily life or trivial events, they convey some poetic sense, such as indescribable presence, gentle time flow, or ambivalent nuance that subtly swings. Asai pays attention to commonplace subjects and turns them into possessing poesy through her unique sensibility. This type of approach clearly applies to some of her works, including the beautiful photos of dust covering a doll, the tiny houses made of medicine capsules and pills, and the video composed of familiar subjects that waver gently and repeat appearing and disappearing.

In Asai’s work beautiful town (plenty of empty) for this exhibition, we are able to discover the same sense of aesthetics. This large-scale installation is composed of many “cheap” miniature houses, which are made of medicine packages that Asai and her friends have used in the past. Each house is on a small spring that tilts, and it sways with only slight vibration. It tells us that this work as a whole is constructed in a humble, unstable world. 

The fact that used medicine packages are utilized in her work allows us to consider that as we take medicines to avoid pain or anxiety, empty medicine packages can be seen as trash that resulted from our daily-life anxieties. In Asai’s work, empty medicine packages have been created into houses, which should basically be the source of peaceful, stable life. Her miniature houses convey a sense of emptiness and unstableness, as if they are about to collapse. These impressions are related to the underlying meanings of used medicine packages.

However, the most important point is that Asai never shows those negative aspects just as they are. What we find is that she paradoxically employs a unique poesy within her works. The town with colorful and glittering miniature houses in her work allows us to perceive a rich narrative imagination. The houses bouncing as if there were no gravity are an amusing sight, in that they are like toys. Although the motifs she adopted are hackneyed and empty, her works have a sense of humor that is full of poesy. This paradoxical poesy must be what makes Asai’s expressions so appealing. 

（trancelated by Atsuko Tsunoda)