Nobuaki Onishi: Chain

　　Six hundred and seventy-two butterflies were pasted on the wall [fig. 1] [fig. 2]. The reason why I could accurately grasp the number of butterflies was of course not that I counted all of them piece by piece but that they were orderly arranged in twenty-one widthwise and thirty-two lengthwise. Each butterfly was attached on the wall with its center pinned as if it was a specimen.
　　However, the butterflies were obliquely arrayed. This made me feel some kind of restlessness. In addition, the butterflies were not real ones. Actually, patterns composed of dots in varying size were printed on a film in the shape of butterfly. Therefore, each film seemingly looked like a real butterfly.
　　Furthermore, these six hundred and seventy-two butterflies were made using only six species of butterfly as their motifs.^*1 The array of exactly the same figures as well as the accumulation of dots represented that the butterflies were created through an extremely automatic process. My unsettledness might have been due to a psychological pressure caused by the excess repetition of the same form made in an artificial way.

　　The exhibit entitled “Chain/banana, ice” (DVD-R, 2009) [fig. 3][fig. 4] was a film work which was an uncommon style of work among Onishi’s creations. In this piece, five monitors were arranged in a row. Images of bananas and pieces of ice were being aired repeatedly on the monitors. The color of banana peels gradually turned from yellow to black and ice started to melt. Despite this, at the bottom part of picture plane, there was the only one row of image in which bananas and ice remained unchanged in the least. In this part, the color of bananas remained yellow without any discoloration and the pieces of ice kept their form cubed. There was Onishi’s device that using the same images on all the five monitors to express something like a chain by making viewers feel as if the part which ultimately remained unchanged in each picture plane linked together with other unchanging part found on the next monitor.

The part of image remaining unchanged was a fake. In each picture plane, Onishi partly replaced a real image with an imitation. And the fake image emphasized the existence of true one. Finally, real things having completely melted/rotted gave places to fakes remaining unmelted/unchanged. Thus, true things died and imitations survived.
　　The thing having made me fear was the fact that there was something unchanged. The “constancy” may scare us so often. Despite this, why on earth is the sublimity of the eternalness excessively bruited these days? The beautifulness may be one of the best examples of the nobility of unchanged things. In the “Chain”, Onishi made a part of trivial things, such as bananas and pieces of ice, overly transformed into unaltering things with the aim of focusing on the eeriness of constancy. The constancy means remaining the same.

The installation and the film work, both of which were created using butterflies as their motifs, were displayed together in the same exhibition space. A wooden wall with speakers attached [fig. 5] was found between the two creations. The sound of birdsong was heard from the “Music for Chain” (2009). It was also coming from the speakers continuously while I was viewing the other exhibits. The birdcalls heard from the right and left speakers resonated with the room, which made me feel as if I was in a mountain full of birdsong. However, obviously, the place on which I was standing was not a mountain but a gallery space. In addition, the wall with the speakers was installed in some discourteous way. Immediately after entering the exhibition room, I found at first the back side of the speakers attached to the wall. Equipments were barely exposed. The wooden wall apparently looked like a kind of partition, therefore, in fact, it seemed to be difficult for viewers to momentarily notice the sound of birdsong heard throughout the venue was imposingly coming from the two speakers put on the wall, but it might not have taken a lot of time to recognize that. The replication and repetition of birdcalls briefly conveyed a factor which was common throughout the creations shown in this exhibition.

Onishi’s works presented in this solo exhibition entitled “Chain” held in Gallery Nomart had one thing in common in that they were created under the “same” key concept, though they were made in varying forms, such as stereoscopic creations, planar works, music and images. The thought concerning two opponent things, namely, “true” versus “false” and “uniqueness” versus “replication”, was repeatedly used in all exhibits. Despite this, what was notable in this exhibition was that Onishi proposed many different kinds of variations. In other words, fine “differences” were generated from various kinds of outputting methods used in his creations, though the origin of thought was “same” among all the exhibits. This was exactly the reason why I trembled in fear in front of Onishi’s works without adjusting to the eeriness of remaning the “same”.
(Translated by Nozomi Nakayama)