The historical relationship between Japan and Korea is complex, marked by periods of conflict and cultural misunderstanding. In 1905, Korea came under Japanese occupation and was later transformed into a colony. During this time, Korean cultural practices were suppressed, and the people were subjected to tremendous violence. At the end of the World War II, after Japan’s withdrawal, Korea was left as a divided and deeply traumatized country.
In this exhibition, Asako Shiroki explores the difficult relationship in three different works. The pivotal work Evergreen, hanging from the ceiling on a silver chain, is at the center of the room. The term „center“ however, is somewhat misleading here. Evergreen is not only a spatial object, which begins on the floor alluding to the coastline of Japan and Korea and ends in the air with a glass bottle reminiscent of the size of a human heart. This bottle holds a distillation of pine needles gathered from both nations, weighing precisely 21 grams—a figure mythically believed to be the weight of the human soul. The liquid releases the characteristic scent of pine trees, a scent that almost everyone associates with some memory or other. Shiroki thus presents a sculpture that is not merely spatial but also olfactory, that transcends the visible and touchable, that takes itself out of the center of space by becoming space itself—a space filled with memories.
The concept of dissolving boundaries is also captured in Melting into color. This work features two photographs of pine trees from Korea and Japan. Or to be more precise: The picture on the left shows a Korean pine tree together with pine branches brought from Japan. The picture on the right shows a Japanese pine tree together with pine branches brought from Korea. The photographs are deliberately out of focus, transforming the pines into abstract patterns of color. By adjusting the camera’s lens to defocus, the finer details are obscured, yet paradoxically, this allows the intrinsic nature of the subjects to be perceived with greater clarity. As if the object’s very dissolution revealed the essence of its soul.
The video installation Invisible yet still green was conceived amidst the distillation process of extracting pine scent. The focus, however, is less on the actual production and more on the abstract transitions between states of matter: Solid needles turn into liquid and ultimately into scent. In this work, too, boundaries are crossed, albeit in an even more radical sense: What is shown here is not only the dissolution of a spatial sculpture into scent (as in Evergreen), nor the dissolution of an object into pure color (as in Melting into color), but the dissolution of materiality itself, the detachment from any physical form, reminiscent of a soul’s journey from one state (or embodiment or memory) to another.
text: Clemens Espenlaub
photos: Nils Bornemann
