Maison Hermes 8F Forum
Closes in 15 days
Do you know what stands on top of Ginza's lantern like Hermes Building? If not, don't bother looking up next time you're on Harumi Dori. Tatzu Nishi -- alias Tazro Niscino, alias Tatsuro Bashi -- has boxed it up.
Despite his three names, Nishi has built himself a reputation in Europe for installations that bizarrely merge the public world with the private. With the aid of scaffolding, Nishi temporarily builds realistic and intimate living spaces around fixed public objects, regardless of their size or elevation. He has domesticated everything from gigantic town square monuments, to small, often overlooked urban features. Street lamps turn up in living rooms as reading lamps; church weathervanes, which in reality stand 10 or 15 stories in the sky, become innocuous coffee table ornaments. In his most famous work to date, "Villa Victoria" for Liverpool's 2002 Biennale, Nishi -- then Tatsuro Bashi -- constructed a working four star hotel room around a five meter-tall monument of Queen Victoria. Surrounded by orange carpet, seemingly removed off her plinth, she may have regally ignored everyone, but she stood unforgettably in the minds of all who entered the room.
Though you won't see Queen Victoria or street lamps on top of the Hermes Building -- they exist only in catalog form -- you will see a new site specific installation that questions place and scale. Though "Cheri in the Sky" may not have the impact of Nishi's European work, it is a wonderful introduction to his unique world.
