Image:Courtesy of the artist

Soma Sato has created works such as intricately documented his long-lived home in London using 3D scans, sculptures based on repeated visits to a fallen shrine tree for research and fieldwork, and photographs that objectively captured an arrangement of houses in Megumino, the city where he was born and raised. These works are themed on culture, climate, people’s memories, and customs, and the subjects are deeply related to an identity and belonging of the individuals and societies. Sato explores the relationship between the peripheral areas surrounding our bodies and minds, in-between the contemporary scientific and cultural realms.

Entangled Dimensions was held as the first exhibition at Ku-kan. Ku-kan is situated just a little outside from the city centre of Sapporo, on the second floor of a former factory building, the space is almost entirely used as it was, near the Toyohira River, which runs through the city. Sato lives in Kikusui, opposite side from the Ku-kan across the Minami-ichijo Bridge, and inspired by crossing the Bridge from his house to and from Ku-kan, he started to dig into the past of the site as a former factory , and the history of its area through researches and fieldworks.

At the centre of the exhibition space, You see the view from nowhere (2019), exhibited on a tilted screen, is a video work that employed a 3D scanner to document a house  Sato used to live in when he was living in London. The house is a place that has been dwelled and handed over by Japanese, and its structure and everyday objects are recorded as monochrome pointcloud data. The scanned interior gently rotates around the centre-point where the scanner is placed, and the sounds of everyday life in the space can be heard. The moving images are projected onto a huge 4-metre-wide screen, which is inclined and suspended in mid-air, giving an impression of a full-scale three-dimensional room in front of the viewer. Sound is also played using woofers so that it vibrates the entire venue, creating a real experience that can be felt through the skin, despite being an image on a screen.

Behind the screen, the Entangled Dimensions series is installed, which gave the exhibition its title. These new works, based on research into the venue and the Kikusui area, consist of apples encased in resin and hardened. The apples are in a range of conditions, from fresh to rotten. The decomposed apples, encased in resin moulded from the shape of each original apple, maintain both their former and transformed forms. In researching Kikusui, Sato focused on layers of the site’s history as a former Yukaku(red-light district) and the fact that the Minami Ichijo Bridge was built by people involved in brothels as infrastructure for their lives.

Kikusui used to be an apple orchard before the Yukaku was established. However, the apple orchard became difficult to maintain due to an epidemic, and later orchardists in the area came forward to relocate the Yukaku from Susukino, and the Yukaku was invited to Kikusui. The work, which solidifies the apples sold at  a greengrocer that (unintentionally) exists on the former site of the brothel, recalls the entanglements of time.

Texts describing the history of Kikusui, apples and Yukaku, texts by the artist on the background of his work, and texts relating to the apple orchards of Takuboku Ishikawa and Takero Arishima during their time in the area in the early twentieth century are scattered throughout the exhibition space.

I first met you when I was still living in Sapporo. My rented house was on the right bank of a river called the Toyohira River, which runs through the outskirts of Sapporo. The house was situated in a large apple orchard  of about 9,900㎡ nearby the bank.

Takero Arishima (Novelist). 1918. Umare Izuru Nayami.

[From the text exhibited. English translation by the artist]

The texts of the artist’s background, of the history of Sapporo and of the individuals who once spent time there serve as a link in the same space between the culture cultivated as we live and the culture of the past that has been largely forgotten. It makes us realise that things from different dimensions of culture and history exist in this place Kikusui in an entwined and entangled way.

The exhibition’s key visual, Kyomu (2017), was exhibited on the wall immediately after entering the exhibition space. This photographic work consists of a number of overlapping landscapes of Sato’s hometown, Megumino, and the entire work is coloured like a blueprint. Megumino is a new town built as an ideal city, with a landscape of evenly spaced houses on a grid of streets. Growing up there, Sato had felt  a discrepancy between a given identity as a Japanese individual and the identities attributed to the landscape, or the psychological landscape imagined from his inner-reality of the time.

In this exhibition, unfolding with the work Kyomu as its introduction, Sato presents a contextual exploration around the notion of ‘home/dwelling’ and its periphery, with references to a Japanese individual residing in London, the artist’s upbringing and current place of residence, all of which offer a multifaceted perspective on the relationship between the self and its surroundings. And for the viewers who visited the exhibition space at Ku-kan, the experience of its entangled dimensions would have provided an opportunity to form new relationships with the building, the place and the surrounding realms.

Ku-kan Director Taiga Kawakami