Magical Art Room
Don't want to go to a gallery? Why not walk past one instead. Magical Art Room in Roppongi (www.magical-artroom.com) is currently showing an installation by artist Hitoshi Kuriyama that can only be observed from outside the gallery's storefront window.
Working with fluorescent lights, Kuriyama has installed on the building's fourth floor, "life-reduction," a series that goes from flickering tubes on the ceiling to a pile of glass dust in a corner. In between, full and broken tubes make a complex matrix that points in all directions. Kuriyama says he's interested in states between creation and disappearances, as represented by the flickering lights and the deconstructed tubes. On the first floor, viewers may view from the outside his latest installation, "control-a room." Looking in, you'll see the painful, arrhythmic convulsions of the lights as they act independently of their creators.
It's a telling work, especially as Magical Art Room will have to move soon to Ebisu, as the Mori construction group is tearing the building down. Like Roppongi, which is changing before our eyes, Magical Art Room is closing down its current location not with a bang, but a sputter. Considering their manifesto, "Everything is difference, and each difference is linked to all other differences," look forward to the gallery turning the lights back on elsewhere.