HIRO YAMAGATA: "QUANTUM FIELD X3" AND FURTHER REVELATIONS
By SAM HUNTER
In his profound desire and pursuit to perceive the infinite, Hiro Yamagata has probed the minutest microcosms and, in a seeming paradox, expanded his consciousness into cosmic realms. But in "Quantum Induction," his latest, most ambitious laser installation, the Japanese-born artist who bases his wide-ranging activities in Los Angeles comes closer than ever before to realizing his elusive, ultimate goal.
"I do not want to miss the simple things of life: the rose petals, flowering nature," Yamagata has said. "I think of nature in a pretty simple way; it is something close to me. I also want to live a simple life as an artist. I am not really concerned about being a great artist, or a great thinker, or a great philosopher. "I want to live a simple life, and make sure that I experience everything around me, to the fullest capability of all my senses."
Given the scope of his quite extraordinary range of projects that include the lushly painted luxury cars in Earthly Paradise of the mid-nineties and the confrontational monumentality of such late-nineties statements as Eternity or What and American Lips, the emphasis on simplicity in his credo might seem disingenuous. But, in a typically paradoxical and engaging Zen style, Yamagata has expressed nothing more -- and nothing less - than the force motivating all of his quests, from a youthful interest in the starry night sky and then quantum physics to his recent mastery of the complex technology necessary to throw open the very doors of perception, and give shape to the mysterious forces that drive life itself.
In his most recent adventure, Quantum Induction, the dramatic, luminous production planned for a June 2004 premiere this summer at Frank Gehry's spectacular, sinuous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Yamagata builds on his fascination with environmental light shows that actually began during the seventies, when he found himself living in Paris, at the forefront and cutting-edge of the Paris art scene, and tentatively exploring the use of lighting equipment. However, it took two more decades before he seriously became engaged by ambitious and complex laser installations, commencing in 1997 with his complex, ground-breaking Element installation, produced at the Fred Hoffman Fine Art gallery in Santa Monica. Five years later Yamagata's ambitious laser-light display at the Bilbao Guggenheim in 2001 Photon 0.99 cast brilliant prismatic beams around its enchanted visitors.
Quantum Induction goes farther, and adds elements that extend its vibrancy and magical effects into the daylight hours, and into its observers' space. And with the preliminary Plasma Cubes, an installation of five twelve-foot cubes on Beverly Hills lawns, Quantum Induction was designed to bring the previously invisible portion of the light available to the human eye into a dynamic, explosively lucid visibility. The concept illustrated in both Plasma Cubes and Quantum Induction springs from a similar impulse and, in keeping with Yamagata's overarching desire to lift the veil on natural wonders that lie beyond the range of human vision, they appear simultaneously very simple, ambitious and multi-faceted.
"The age of our solar system is 4.6 billion years," he has said. "Since the field of physical science began, humans have been trying to grasp and understand the nature and function of light particles. Every organic structure on Earth reacts to various frequencies from the Sun and also receives its energy, including but not excluding Gamma rays, sun heat, plasma, solar wind, ultrasound waves, radiation, ultraviolet and infrared rays.
"These activate natural processes like photosynthesis, which in turn emits its own energy. For example, regarding sight: the sun is the source of all light in the solar system. But our visual perception is limited to 0.38 percent of the emitted solar light spectrum," the artist has recently said. "Though it is natural for humans to believe they perceive everything, there is quite a bit of natural phenomena that our senses are simply not aware of."
To make visible those floods of lost light - literally, in an extension of the radiant Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Earthly Paradise and the twinkling, flashing, disorienting universe evoked by his stupendous 2001 New York installation, NGC6903 - Yamagata created a system of holographic panels and lasers to be placed in and around the shimmering titanium skin of Frank Gehry's futuristic, yet organic Guggenheim Musueum in Bilbao this summer. During the day, sunlight will strike the sides of four strategically placed cubes made of panels embossed with prismatic coating, which will alter the frequencies of electromagnetic fields.
As the light strikes the holographic panels and is fractured into random rainbows, iridescent hazes, the cubes begin to interact - with viewers, certainly, but also with one another in pulsating, unpredictable patterns. Daylight "causes refractions resulting in a prism-like view of the light spectrum," Yamagata has said. "The layers of reflections flicker, wash and glow between the cubes, creating intricate dances of stunning life. The colors, which are derived from the size and the brightness of light, evolve and change, as the viewer observes their reflections and refractions from different angles."
At night, the panels' intensity will increase exponentially, along with the drama of the light effects reminiscent of cosmically charged aurora borealis or other awe-inspiring natural events the installation was designed to suggest. As the sun begins to set over the undulating surface of Gehry's futuristic architectural masterpiece, a computer-generated laser system that resembles a hovering flying saucer will project beams onto the panels, taking the place of the Sun and heightening effects that normally are blunted and softened by the atmosphere and natural solar distance.
A shifting series of beams will touch the holographic panels' embossed surfaces, enhancing the cubes' animation; shooting simultaneously from one panel to another, they will reinforce the energy generated by the lasers themselves while refracting into the dark or spangled night skies over the ancient Spanish city. More than mere dancing cubes or glimmering curtains of Northern Lights, moved by the artist to Bilbao for an eye-opening - and, intentionally, mind-bending -- period of time, the laser-lit panels will flash and flare with a greater proportion of the universe's animating energy than humans have ever experienced before, in all of history and even in the most vivid imaginations.
In Yamagata's most recent laser installations and his foray into making mysteries visible by opening doors of perception for himself and, by extension, for all humanity, he engages less in unveiling the mysteries of the universe than a celebration of sheer visual beauty. Actually, this has been a goal and touchstone of his investigations throughout his 30-year career. The roots of Yamagata's enduring reverence for nature, and his ongoing wish to experience it as fully as possible and in every imaginable form, from the most direct and tactile to the most cerebral and sublime, and even emotionally shattering, are rooted deeply in his Japanese origins.
His particular angle of vision was centered at an impressionable stage of his life by his exposure to the avant-garde experiments into stroboscopic, multimedia, interactive light shows that he experienced in Paris so long ago. Apart from his involvement in shaping stage sets for such newly rediscovered vanguard productions, he was also impressed by the turn-of-the-century French surrealist play Ubu Roi," during his Parisian years in the seventies. In due course his essentially Taoist outlook melded with modernist Western influences. To a young, philosophical artist seeking answers to life's eternal questions- as Paul Gauguin had expressed them so simply in his most philosophical painting title, Qui Sommes Nous? D'Ou Venons Nous? Ou Allons Nous? - there were for Yamagata innumerable clues, whispers, glimpses and hints that were to reveal themselves in magical Paris, the center of the artistic universe, and a most marvelously enticing source of new voices, quaint mediums and even of eternally evolving technical methods.
Soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1975 Yamagata, launched his joyous and witty early prints and cartoon-oriented paintings on a tour of the United States that continued into the mid-eighties, even as he continued his late-seventies European Tour. His fusion of creative sources culminated in the commemorative paintings for two centenaries that slyly alluded to the birth of modernism and supported his own inclination of blending European and American cultural forces, as he adopted the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and of the Eiffel Tower, synthesizing the old worl;d and the new in a fresh pictorial amalgam.
The artist's first major, truly original project, Earthly Paradise, also germinated for years, and required a remarkably multi-layered approach. Not only did Yamagata assemble a team of technicians who could painstakingly apply his designs for naturalistic tropical foliage to the hoods, fenders and other surfaces of vintage Mercedes-Benz cabriolets, he brought together specialists able to find and restore thos artistically transformed, "dream vehicles" from the ground up, in every detail. The scientific aspects of his projects are a crucial factor, one that takes on new urgency with each fresh, increasingly complex series. In their final form, the entirely functional but ultimately dreamlike elements of Earthly Paradise - luxury automobiles salvaged, sometimes from mere scraps, and transformed into nature itself - blended their diametrically opposed symbolism and implications. These extraordinary vintage cars seemed to resurrect the ghosts of powerful, internal-combustion engines with their assault on the environment, and yet, through applications of paint they were magically transformed into fragile artistic vessels, even supporting environmental purity, by way of their magically restored forms, swathed in seductive chromatic beauty and transformed into a world of pristine nature efffects.
Yamagata's lifelong search for statements that would synthesize such paradoxical viewpoints, and divergent elements, took wing in the nineties, as his Earthly Paradise exhibition traveled world-wide and presented his highly original transformation of the vision of the reconstituted motorcar throughout America, Europe and Asia in popular touring exhibitions. The once-accepted links between art and science were restored, symbolically and literally, in the displays of transportation icons that embodied an elusive, lyrical philosophy as surely as Botticelli's goddesses had in The Birth of Venus, draped in the very flora of springtime. In his first ambitious laser installation, the 1997 project entitled simply Element, to suggest the creative fusion of art and technology, Yamagata seemed to be making an abrupt artistic detour into mechanistic, less soothing and tactile realms. The glinting, gyrating cubes of the Santa Monica environmental work, however, only took the artist's innate and ever-more seamless fusion of inspiration and technology to fresh, truly subliminal heights, and his complex, truly daring invention also supported Yamagata's truly remarkable range of expression.
At the same time, the versatile, deeply experimental artist was reaching out in other directions as he fused science, art and life and - to borrow Robert Rauschenberg's famously Zen pronouncement of a half-century ago - Yamagata felt challenged to work in the tenuous spaces between "art snd Life." The fragile bridge between the dreamlike and gorgeously poetic images evoked by the wealth of elegantly restored cabriolets and the extensive, electrifying forays into the cosmos that have culminated, thus far, in Quantum Induction was the subtle photography show, entitled Eternity or What, which opened in April 1997 in Santa Monica. The ironic exhibition of monumental photographs diverged in very different directions: the elegant black-and-white visual essay on the nature of such fragile entities as smoke, the gas produced when heat creates fire; and luridly luminous investigations of burgeoning organic matter, in color so acrid that it hardly seems real.
The gaseous swirls unleashed by fire, themselves a form of ghostly particulates that symbolize primal transformation in the Smoke series, are more than an insightful scientific study; vastly enlarged, the swirling forms of white on infinite, velvety black became both shorthand references to a reiteration of Newtonian principles and glorious, immersive environments dominated by self-generating abstractions. The color studies of bacteria and fungus, vastly enlarged to show their cellular details, probe the origins of all life, springing forth spontaneously from the interaction of light and water. While Earthly Paradise touched on the pivotal point between nature and its polar opposite, Eternity or What slid far below the surface to peer at another boundary: the once-invisible dividing line between life and non-life, between truths invisible to the naked eye and their vivid, dramatic revelation.
In an impressive course reversal in the nineties, Yamagata went on to explore his first great and complex series of laser-based works that began with Element in 1997, in the space arranged by his Santa Monica gallery. There he and his, responsive technicians built an ingenious, extremely challenging stage set that enabled Yamagata to invade spaces that they could never perceive in nature; instead of simply experiencing the immersive environment projected by the photo-murals in Eternity or What, Yamagata enveloped the observer for the first time in a gallery space whose Mylar walls, ceiling and floor permitted infinite and often disorienting reflections. Complex sets of strobes, lasers and other lights beamed onto the gallery's perimeter as well as onto mirrored cubes that rotated according to the artist's preset program, or simply swayed and swiveled in accidental, serendipitous patterns.
Yamagata again deconstructed reality in a surprising early 1999 exhibition before turning decisively to his groundbreaking work in new laser installations. In an ingenious exhibition, entitled American Lips, and staged at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea in May and June, he took objects as familiar - and, thus, unremarkable -- as female lips, with and without lipstick application, and enlarged the images to stupendous scale, with an evident touch of irony. The impact was dramatic and paradoxical: lips taken for granted on film stars and other celebrities, his ostensible subject, become instead near-abstract, grotesque comments on the peculiar gap between what we automatically perceive and dismiss, and its actual, elemental, quite unpleasant reality.
Meanwhile, the shimmering, infinitely colorful, l enclosed space of Element had paved the way in quick succession for the Sculpture of Light and a two-mile-long installation on the Los Angeles River, both in 1998, and the impressive Laumeier Sculpture Park installation in St. Louis a year latre. Like psychedelic rock-concert pyrotechnics or a more definite and enduring form of fireworks, these early installations explored ways Yamagata could manipulate beams of colored light to suggest altered perceptions and mysterious, previously unseen realities. His Solar System Installations, an ongoing experimental series that generates his recent site-specific projects, began in 2000 at the artist's quasi-studio, quasi-laboratory in Malibu, a laser installation that so impressed a leading modernist architect, Frank Gehry, that he described Yamagata as "most certainly an artist for the new century. He has commandeered the most advanced technologies available to the science of light, and has produced a staggering art form. This work deserves consideration from the very art culture it is challenging."
With the ambitious, diverse cluster of light-driven impressions made by his 2001 exhibition in New York, NGC6093, the art culture - and, indeed, as viewers from various walks of life crowded the 25,000-square-foot art space in lower Manhattan from May to October that year in an extended showing - the wider community, including the art press, embraced Yamagata's sublime vision on a grand scale for the first time. Within the installation, they found themselves floating in a seemingly boundless space filled with twinkling, twirling, glinting icy cubes in the large main gallery, then exposed to raw galvanic energy as blasts of light pieced utter blackness in a small side space. Hot winds suggested solar activity in a long, dark hall animated by flashes of white light and dizzying reflections. Most lyrical, and impressive were the vast, unending universes evoked in the display of glowing, gently flaring and - just as gently, inevitably - fading fiber-optic elements that made the distant galaxies come to life before the observer.
Yamagata's first installation at Gehry's sleek, metal-clad Guggenheim Museum, Photon 0.99, brought an array of celestial forms to Earth - or, perhaps, transported participants into the heavens, as it seemed - that some year. Instead of floating through stars or kaleidoscopically shifting cosmic clouds in a carefully controlled interior space, visitors were surrounded by rainbow beams emerging from a reflective pond and shimmering across and against the museum's titanium surface. The most recent installation In Bilbao is more ambitious, and more fully enveloping. By adding a daylight dimension that allows the viewer to experience the transforming effect of the life-giving solar beams, he has expanded the visual, intellectual and lyrical potential already evident in his earlier installations at the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.
That work, conceived in collaboration with Gehry's distinctive architecture, was intended as a three-dimensional door, the passageway to an altered consciousness that would allow the observer to see new worlds, and old worlds in new light. "The museum visitor is invited to walk along this laser path, and in so doing to feel transported into another realm or dimension - as if temporarily carried away into a new kind of space, a space created solely out of light," the artist has said. "I want the viewer to equally engage with the installation from outside this virtual space."
Equally important, however, is the cultural and art-historical context established for Yamagata and his works, and the insights the artist himself brings to his inspirations. "Since the beginning of time, humans have pondered the notion of what they are made of and what particular combination and reaction of elements occurs to produce life," he has said in a private discussion, providing some philosophical and personal background for his work. As he imagines his infinitely vast universe and projects it for his viewers with lasers and increasingly sophisticated tools or, conversely, as he has probed the unimaginably small world of microscopic gasses and human flesh - actual objects of desire, his motivation remains clear, and it is both witty and poetic.
"Modern science has broken down the human condition into a highly intricate sum of elements, all of which coexist in each other to form an interdependent web of alliances that sustain life. Increasingly we know more and more about what causes life, and this knowledge at times can produce a profound awakening of what we truly are." Yamagata told the author. "Light has always been the key ingredient in the equation that produces life on earth. Without the essential element of light, the combination of materials that form the human body and other bodies of living forms could not or would not exist. Light plays the final role in providing that spark which creates life on earth. Without it, life would not exist."
That core belief is made abundantly clear, day and night, in the forthcoming exhibition at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Rather than limiting his radiant vision to observers actually walking over the museum's reflecting pool at night, Quantum Induction can be experienced in a more universal way by those spectators located outside the museum grounds, and the imagery is visible round the clock, night and day. Suddenly, dramatically and, not the least, in a sublime shower of shimmering, flashing rainbows, observers will find themselves able to witness new ranges of light, and quite amazing aspects of mundane life that were there all along. Since we humans are able to perceive only a minuscule portion of the emitted solar light spectrum, they seemed to have penetrated a new, unknown realm of the invisible! For more than three decades, Yamagata has been a magician poised between worlds: science and art; the avant-garde and the naturalistic; the artificial and the simplistic natural; the visible and the painfully imperceptible.
All that changes with Quantum Induction, as through Yamagata's technical and conceptual alchemy in daylight bathes the silvery cubes, and they shimmer with an iridescence that shifts from one to the other and then, stunningly, the subtler hues and patterns reveal stronger, more intense vibrancy. The explanation is reassuringly scientific, but the installation's implications are at once more elusive and far more Romantic, in an extraordinarily sublime sense. At night, when the full potential of the colorful stelae of Quantum Induction come into play, "Laser beams function like the sun in that they create light from each electron's reaction to different particles," the artist has said. "By reflecting and refracting the laser beams onto the holographic surfaces, we can experience the particles of the sun ordinarily not perceived by humans.
"The reflection of the laser beams bouncing off the cubes creates the illusion of a non-material structure between the cubes," Yamagata notes. "In this way, we see the lights we have never seen before, and the visual effects appear miraculously- physical to us."
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