Takashi Horisaki
#Applebonsai 2022
Ceramic, 5 x 6 x 6.5 in
$900
__________________
Takashi Horisaki (b.Japan) is a sculptor and community-based artist living between New York and Tokyo. His work focuses on the relationship of architecture, the built environment, and material culture to issues of social inequality, community-building, migration, and cultural circulation. Horisaki holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, a BFA from Loyola University in New Orleans, and a BA in Art History from Waseda University. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including New Orleans’s Prospect.1 Biennial (2008), the Incheon Women Artists Biennale, Korea (2009), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012), and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2012). He has received commissions from organizations including Sculpture Center, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; the Queens Museum of Art, NY; Recess SoHo and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY. His work has also been shown at numerous venues including SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020); Komagome Soko (Tokyo, 2019); BankArt 1929’s R16 Studio (Yokohama, 2018); Spring/Break Art Show’s BKLYN IMMERSIVE (NY, 2017), Abrons Arts Center Gallery (NY, 2013, 2011); the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany (2008); and Flux Factory Inc., Queens (2006, 2007).
#InstaBonsai Series shown in “Kiln Gods” is initially inspired by the variety of forms that “bonsai” took under the hashtag #bonsai on Instagram, #InstaBonsai is a series of ceramic cactus planters, sculptures, photographs, Instagram posts, postcards and more that consider the circulation of images and culture in the age of social media. Bonsai as a form was initially codified in the late Edo period, just in time for them to be featured as a “traditional” cultural product in nineteenth-century Japanese pavilions at the earliest Worlds Fairs in which Japan participated, so their forms and presentation are intimately tied to cultural politics and colonial trade. In the age of social media, the rapid dissemination and circulation of images across various geographies accelerates the speed of adaptation and redefinition, much as the trade pressures of early capitalism and industrialization created the cultures of indoor plants and Worlds Expositions that led to the identification of bonsai culture, originally adapted from Chinese ideas on gardening, with Japan. How do the pressures of social media in late-stage capitalism reshape our ideas of traditions and cultural appropriation/adaptation? And how does the material difference between different physical media—Instagram images, printed photographs, ceramic sculptures, emails, physical postcards, etc—further inflect the new iterations that emerge? What is material culture and what does it mean in the age of the electronic image?
