Most of us have experienced waking up in a strange room, perhaps in a hotel or a friend's house, and, for a split second, not knowing where we are — that fuzzy, vague feeling in the twilight zone between waking and dreaming. Imagine having those same feelings when waking up in your own, usually familiar, room, as though you had partially lost your memory or sense of identity.
The art in "Asleep, A Room Awakens," a solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Donna Ong, attempts to put such fleeting, obscure and indefinable feelings into images. The exhibition is showing at Wada Fine Arts in the back streets of Tsukiji near Ginza and is comprised of three pieces: two video works and what could perhaps be awkwardly described as a photo installation. The latter (from which the exhibition's title comes) features boxes containing layers of acrylic and transparent sheets of film that are overlapped to create shimmering, even ghostly, photographic recreations of room interiors.
For individual pieces, Ong first makes dioramas of interiors and photographs them. These are then printed on sheets that are layered to a depth of nearly 6 cm, creating a 3-D image of floating doors, windows and furniture fixed in neither a concrete space nor a concrete reality. There are about a half dozen such boxes lining two of the gallery walls.