Rei Naito: 'come live, live'
Exhibition Information
I went to the Tokyo National Museum to see Rei Naito's 'come live, live'.
The exhibition runs from Tuesday, June 25, 2024, to Monday, September 23, 2024 (holiday).
As a collaborative project, an exhibition of the same name is being held at the Hermès Ginza store, running from Saturday, September 7, 2024, to Monday, January 13, 2025 (holiday).
Official website:
https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=2637
Tickets are sold out.
Also, photography is prohibited.
The exhibition is divided into three locations within the museum.
Venue 1: Heiseikan Special Exhibition Room
Venue 2: Main Building Special Room 5
Venue 3: Main Building 1st Floor Lounge
The ticket specifies an entry time, but this is only for the first venue; you are free to visit the others afterward. Also, re-entry is likely possible.
This layout clearly assumes that people coming for Rei Naito's exhibition will walk around the museum while viewing the permanent collection.
Naito's exhibition also incorporates numerous earthenware vessels and animal bones not created by her, integrating them into the museum's purpose and breathing life into them.
Her exhibition becomes a face and a mouth, speaking of the museum's history and thoughts, the time witnessed by the ancient objects housed there, and the continuous, unbroken history of human activity.
What does 'catchy and popular' mean?
It had been a long time since I last visited the Tokyo National Museum.
I come to Ueno often, but usually it's to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum or the National Museum of Nature and Science.
Why is that?
Perhaps my taste in special exhibitions aligns better with those.
Maybe they have more things that are catchy and popular.
I make it a point to jump into those kinds of things first.
If you don't know what many people have appreciated and what many people know, you cannot understand the things that are minor and difficult to approach.
I personally don't think of the artist Rei Naito as being particularly catchy or popular. Though that is just my personal opinion.
If beauty is catchy and the popularity that sells out tickets is what makes something popular, then she should definitely fit that description, but
with so many people,
witnessing that work,
are they seeing the same thing as I am?
With eyes shining and smiles on their faces, saying, 'I am looking at something truly enjoyable and interesting'?
When I think about that, the image of people in the world becomes uncertain to me.
Mourning
Because,
I always
feel a sense of mourning
in Rei Naito's work.
Strongly.
Strongly.
What are they all coming here to mourn?
Or are they coming to wash their hearts with fragments of beauty, mystery, and delicacy?
'But that water is the Sanzu River, you know.'
That kind of
fear and
unease
is what Rei Naito's work is.
As if burying oneself while still alive, as if
quietly forming a line
to return
solemnly
to a cursed cycle of reincarnation.
I feel that color was strong this time as well.
Rei Naito's representative works, Teshima and Naoshima
When it comes to Rei Naito's work, 'Matrix' at the Teshima Art Museum and 'Being Given' at the Naoshima Art House Project come to mind first.
At the Teshima Art Museum, there are water droplets that are born and change shape infinitely in a white dome, and transparent threads fluttering in the wind against the blue sky beyond a large opening. It is undeniable beauty.
At 'Kinza', within the special environment of being confined for a certain period in a dark earthen floor, light leaks from slits a few centimeters wide around the floor, and the voices of people strolling through the art town can be faintly heard. What one sees there is up to the individual, but what I saw was a sinister yet powerful stream of life connecting ancestors to descendants.
What both have in common is that
Rei Naito makes people sensitive. Hypersensitive. Abnormally hypersensitive.
And that people begin to see things that are not written there, things that are not placed there. Each in their own way.
The essence of her work is not about what she wants to say,
(although the themes are likely the identity or continuity of life and death, or the survival of life as a species (that is, as a first-person plural), and what the countless lives that have been buried have felt, but that is not the point)
but rather, I think, it lies in this 'sharpening of human sensibility'.
1. Morgue or Neonatal Ward
The first venue is a long, narrow space where you look into the objects beyond a glass partition. On this side, pom-poms and white balloons hang from the ceiling by fishing line.
It is very dark, but light with a faint bluish tint illuminates the exhibits.
You can also sit on a long bench and gaze at them.
The bench felt less like a place for art viewers to rest and more like a part of the exhibition, a bench that made me feel like I was sitting in a hospital corridor.
This venue is like a morgue, and also like a corridor in front of a neonatal ward.
Life is death, and here, both are new.
2. Grave or Sai no Kawara (Children's Limbo)
The second venue is an atrium with a balcony circling the second floor.
On the walls, paintings with very thin colors made with acrylic paint are just pasted on.
I was afraid of these paintings. It felt like a world where, when waking up from anesthesia or when very ill, a hazy world exists without forming an image.
As always, there are things hanging from the ceiling.
At my feet, Naito's works and old excavated artifacts are housed in acrylic cases (or maybe glass?), and inconspicuous but modest offerings are placed around them. Stones, paper, and so on.
This venue also has a place to sit, but it is a wooden board placed on the floor,
and you have to take off your shoes to sit.
As I sat and watched, the people visiting would crouch or bend at the waist, peering with the utmost care into the transparent acrylic cases placed on the floor, holding even their breath.
Ah, that transparent case is a coffin, isn't it.
3. Once again after flesh and sorrow have decayed and been washed away
The third venue faces a beautiful garden where you can see a pond planted with lotus flowers.
The glass French windows that reveal this garden are also beautiful.
It is a place like a slightly wide corridor, where chairs are placed for passersby to rest.
It is a very crowded place, and it lacks the tranquility of the other venues.
On the floor, there is a bottle of water on a glass stand called 'Matrix,' similar to the one I saw at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama.
It is an edgy display, placed right on the edge
so that people won't accidentally kick it over.
There are two guards watching over it.
Small mirrors the same size as the tiles are attached to the walls here and there. There are a very limited, small number of them.
Visitors to the permanent exhibition who had not come specifically for the Rei Naito exhibition noticed the 'Matrix' on the floor, and were listening to explanations from guides or looking at it, but they rarely noticed the mirrors on the walls.
That is intended.
When you look at this 'Matrix' in the context of the first and second venues,
is it a dead person whom no one remembers anymore,
or is it a neutral state before being born again?
And then I leave that place
And I exited the main building door, went back to the back from the left,
arrived at the beautiful garden I had seen outside the window,
sat on a stone bench,
had one Calorie Mate and some barley tea,
and once again
today
regained the feeling of being alive.