"Memory does not belong to the past; it is the continuous present and future." Artist Kimio Tsuchiya's words speak volumes about "Plastic Memories — to illuminate 'now,' " currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Her work "Fragments of the Moon" (2004) features old bits of chipped pottery assembled in the shape of a crescent to portray the waxing and waning of the moon. Divorced from their previous histories and original uses, the ceramics are reconfigured into an artwork that shows the universal passage of time.
The first in a series of themed exhibitions that draw from the museum's vast collection, "Plastic Memories" spans two floors with contemporary art in a wide range of mediums. Other artists represented also detach memories from "place and time," using them as inspirational crude ores, which are recast into forms that make us contemplate our relationship to today's world.
Enclosed in a cocoon-like space enshrouded in darkness, Fuyuki Yamakawa's "The Voiceover" (1997-2008) engages the viewer with a carefully orchestrated interplay of video clips and fragments of sound. Yamakawa, a Britain-born artist and musician, uses retro TV sets and a large video projection to display fleeting moments of archive material, while viewers listen to a diary-like voiceover. The audio musings on everyday life follow the speaker's career as a news reporter, up until his untimely death. The speaker, it emerges, is actually the artists' father, and the work transforms into a poignant testimony to a deceased parent.