SHINCHIKA

　　Today we can instantaneously access even to the other side of the world by only clicking a button displayed on the Internet. This may sometimes make us lose our bearings. Throughout a game screen we find there is a world created using CG (computer graphics). We can move around in a CG world more freely than in a real world. The exhibition entitled “SHINCHIKA” held in the galley, Ota Fine Arts, which is located in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, made me feel like considering virtual spaces, such as CG world. This was the exhibition of the unit, SHINCHIKA consisting of five members, namely, Tsuyoshi Hisakado, Yosuke Fujino, Rinshiro Fujiki, Shinpei Yoshikawa and Toki Katsumura. The SHINCHIKA has developed various kinds of activities, such as creating graphical and film works and composing music.

　　Immediately after getting off the elevator at the fourth floor where the gallery was located, I heard in the darkness the sound of the music entitled “S-curve” written by SHINCHIKA. The digitally processed sound and the interesting rhythm of the music made me feel comfortable. In this gallery, there was no entrance door. Therefore, viewers were suddenly made step into the world of the exhibition shortly after reaching the floor.
　　A number of mobiles attached with shining reflectors (reflection boards) for automobiles were hung from the ceiling. The light was shining on the small circular reflectors. Viewing this from a distance, something that looked like a particle of light was wavering in the air. Then, looking them more closely, I noticed it was generated from the movement of the boards. The shining reflectors made me imagine even the overall picture of cars. They seemed to be similar to a fragmentary memory, such as that of acquaintance whose only voices I remembered though I could not bring back his/her face or that of coffee shop in which I could remember the design of a coffee cup more intensely than the taste of coffee which I drank at the shop. The details of such reflectors and their movement evoked my various memories. Like the wavering reflectors making me bring back memories of sometime, animations were projected on the wall of the back of the exhibition room [fig. 1].
　　The film work named “yama no michi” (9 min. 21 sec., 2009) was of the story of a young man and a woman climbing the mountain by car. Though some photographed images were included in the film, it was mostly composed of handwritten-like animations, 3D-CGs , and flat icons which seemed to be familiar with people who had an experience in playing computer games made in the 1980s during which the word, “digital”, came to be dominant trends in Japan [fig. 2 and 3]. In the storyline, there was something in common among places where main characters appeared and things they held in hands. For instance, they were in a car, a train and a subway station, flashed backed a refrigerator, and, when they were in a mountain, they held a flashlight from which dry-cell batteries were dropped. Probably, you may feel there is no relationship among the above-mentioned things, but they have in common in that they are associated with a “cave” in today’s Japan. “Caves” have been used in many stories as settings isolated from earth and making us expect that some new things will happen there. Despite this, in the story, characters kept moving in spite of being obsessed with something like a cave and sometimes only the background was shifted while there was no change of characters. Therefore it was difficult for us to realize where characters were. Even a premise - the meaning of the word, “real” - was tactfully dodged in the story by utilizing animations and digital images without mainly using live-action films. In addition, focusing on the story, main characters - a man and a woman - were in an extremely individual world composed of only two persons, namely, “you” and “I”. We were lulled into an illusion as if we were viewing memories of one of characters, “I”.
　　Nevertheless, lastly, a setting of the story changed from an individually closed space to an open world. It was shifted from a cave just like a womb to a landscape in which an eruption of a mountain having a similar shape to Mt. Fuji could be found at a distance. In the last scene of the film, a radio broadcast conveying us the beginning of a peaceful new day was used as the BGM and there was the flow of the “present” time in the story. Before I knew it, characters had disappeared from the picture plane and a focus point was changed from characters to a distant view in which a town landscape spreading at the foot of a mountain. The view was similar to a world in the eyes of newborn babies.

In the field of comic, light novel and animation in Japan today there is a trend of storyline called “Sekai-kei”. In a story known as the “Sekai-kei”, an individual story concerning male and female is casually connected with a theme of the continuation of the entire world. In fact, there is no strict definition of this concept since it was derived from the Internet, but it has been dealt with in some books written by professionals, such as Hiroki Azuma (Extraordinary Professor, Center for the Study of World Civilizations, Tokyo Institute of Technology), criticizing from his perspective in the field of modern thought and formative culture, and Tsunehiro Uno (the organizer of the planned unit, “Dainiji Wakusei Kaihatsu Iinkai), who is the critic in the area of postwar literature and communication. Concerning the “Sekai-kei”, some critics see it as a problematic concept in that it includes a trivialized perspective and a thin world view, while others value it with sensitive psychological descriptions of characters. Indeed, “yama no michi” was apparently created in line with the trend of “Sekai-kei”, but, in the story, there was no description of feelings and thoughts of characters and only a setting of characters and a storyline were created under the concept of “Sekai-kei”. And at the end of the story, characters disappeared from the picture plane. In that instant, the story was made deviate from the category named “Sekai-kei”. Then, viewers were forced to look at the world of the story from perspectives not of characters but of their own. The film did not end in a story of a man and a woman living only in the world of the story. It could be called a device providing viewers with the first opportunity to look at a wide world outside of them. This would be the reason I got a vivid impression of the storages and the town in this world after returning to the aboveground floor to leave the venue.
　　This exhibition epitomized various kinds of things which seemed to be familiar to some people, particularly those living in Japan having been enjoying animations, personal computers and Internet culture since around the 1980s. Through the exhibition, we could realize the fun of actually visiting the gallery and viewing the exhibits in the same period as that of this exhibition. In addition, it is also interesting to imagine how this exhibition would be evaluated in foreign countries and how it will be interpreted in the century ahead. Like the shining reflectors evoking our dim memories (even though they did not remind us of overall pictures of automobiles), the afterimages of the creations shown in this exhibition made me expect that they would be come back to us in some years.
(Translated by Nozomi Nakayama)