nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 5, 2008

Photo provided by Henry ArtGallery, courtesy of SANAA

“Dior Omotesando,” a Dior retail store in Tokyo with semi-transparent acrylic screens all around the clear glass exterior, imparting the building with an eerie, icy look among all the other dark, gloomy buildings.

Architects create permanent ephemera

By N.P. Thompson
Northwest Asian Weekly

No sooner had I arrived at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery on Dec. 1, to take in “Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA,” when snow began to fall. The fleeting loveliness of a Seattle snowstorm, in a way, provided an aesthetically resonant counterpoint for delving into the models, sketches and photographed works of these Tokyo-based architects. SANAA (an acronym for Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) designs buildings and installations that have a hushed integrity, yet are infused with, and invite, a spirit of playfulness. The architects’ signature style, however, goes one better than the snow: permanence that has the effect of ephemera.

Perhaps the most shimmering example of how SANAA tweaks our visual perceptions can be seen in Hisao Suzuki’s photograph, “Dior Omotesando” (2001-2003). This glass skyscraper houses a Christian Dior retail store in Tokyo. Inside the structure, the architects wrapped semitransparent acrylic screens all around the clear glass exterior, fitting it with a new skin, as it were. In Suzuki’s deep-focused nighttime image, the Dior building emerges, seemingly icy to the touch, like a frost-clouded crystal, up from its dark, nondescript neighbors on every side.

To the immediate left of the Dior photo, there’s more textural disorientation in “Installation for the Exhibition Arne Jacobsen — Absolutely Modern” (2002), a triptych of snapshots from SANAA’s insertions of acrylic cylinders over the windows at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. The acrylic surfaces distort the view of the trees outside, causing the greenery to “melt” in one shot and, in an even more ambiguous treatment, to swirl away in a swath of gauze or steam. The third and most memorable component in this peculiar homage to the Danish designer Jacobsen pictures a woman, clad in a black jacket and pea-green skirt, gazing upward to admire the disfiguring transparency that extends the length of floor to ceiling. Her image, in turn, reflects back to us as it might in a funhouse mirror. Her upper body swells slightly; her legs, conversely, splay outward, as narrow and clawlike as chicken feet.

Sejima, who was born in 1956, and Nishizawa, a decade her junior, have been collaborating on design for the past dozen years. In recognition of their work for museums in Kanazawa, Japan, and Valencia, Spain, the duo carried off the Golden Lion award at the 2004 Venice Architectural Biennale.
The Henry exhibit, curated by Ken Tadashi Oshima, features a fetching example of a Nishizawa “solo” project, a model titled, “Garden and House” (2007). On the rooftop garden of this serene, four-story residence (in real life, located in a crammed neighborhood near Tokyo Station), a solitary black silhouette tends to a potted palm. Flowers and trees dominate the glassed-in stories below. A tree planted on the third level shoots through the roof, or at least the ceiling, its leafy branches literally sprouting into the fourth floor in all directions. A lone white chair placed off to the side of the treetop beckons contemplative viewing, a nature meditation in your own home. (If only the stiff-backed chair looked more comfortable.)

There are more hidden-in-plain-sight treasures in this small show than I can enumerate here. Not to be missed are an immense 1998 line drawing, “De Kunstlinie Theatre and Cultural Centre,” and the interior photograph of Sejima’s “House in a Plum Grove” (2001-2003). The former, a slanted aerial sketch, allows us soundstage glimpses into conference and music rehearsal rooms. The preoccupied figures within, dashed off as squiggly blobs, suggest childlike whimsy. The latter, a color-saturated wide-lens shot of a small bedroom, whisks us into a child’s creative space. A table topped by spiral notebooks and a black-and-white floral print takes up nearly the entire frame, with the only spot for a bed being a white-cushioned carving in the wall — an ideal enclosure, in the SANAA scheme of things, for the imagination to rest.

“Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA” is on display at Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, until March 2. On Feb. 9, Ryue Nishizawa visits from Tokyo to give a lecture in the Roethke Auditorium in Kane Hall on the UW campus. For more information on the exhibit and upcoming events, visit www.henryart.org.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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