One reason to enjoy Yukinori Yanagi's solo show at Blum & Poe is the eeriness with which the centerpiece of the exhibition matches the color of the leaves outside the gallery window.
Yanagi's rusty cast-iron 1:50 scale model of the Imperial Japanese Navy ship Akitsushima, a seaplane tender sunk in 1945, looks properly absurd and forlorn on the floor in the middle of the room. Parts of the model are scattered around the hull "ambivalently in a process of either construction or deconstruction," the Blum & Poe website says. Either way, we are viewing the model in an intermediate state — caught in a moment of becoming something else, over and above the corrosion that makes the piece the color of burnt ochre.
On a wall behind the model is a large azure blue painting depicting a diagram of how the model parts fit together. There are also photos of the actual wreck of the Akitsushima, which now rests at the bottom of Coron Bay in the Philippines, and several watercolor sketches of Yanagi's diving logs, all of which date back to the year 2000, when the work was first produced. In one photo, coral growth and other accretions can be seen to have turned the guns into a grimy Rococo candelabra. More transitioning.