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Australia-based contemporary artist Yusuke Takemura is regarded for his highly technical art sculptures realised in glass, that provoke meditations on what it means to be alive, posing questions about identity, memories, and cognitive illusion. His compositions balance delicately, positive and negative space while maintaining the structural integrity of the glass, his material of choice. With his latest art exhibition titled Connectivity displayed at the Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Australia (June 9 - July 9, 2023), Takemura portrays and expands his expertise by employing not only glass, but also, marble sculptures that explore layered ideas of perception, self-image, and human consciousness.
The Japan-born contemporary sculptor uses various techniques of grinding, cutting, and polishing to remove shaped sections from tapering glass vessels. The transparent material here represents one's physical existence, while the chiselled voids symbolise the mind's intangibility. Tension is generated through the material as the load distribution encounters disruptions at the locations of the voids, making the structural integrity of the glass sculpture an act of precise balancing. Takemura also uses this process for marble, posing new challenges of magnified tension and vulnerability to fractures. His sculptures thus stand as a result of dedicated experimentation and practised precision.
With the increasing realisation of virtual realities and identities, the sculpture artist projects abstracted vessel forms onto a composition of optical fibres which support cloud technology and therefore, express connectivity. With a server and modem connected at its base, a vertical glass plane is woven and threaded with these optical fibres that produce the glowing projection of the sculptural vessel. The placement of each fibre is extremely specific and deliberate, as glowing and shadowy features intersect dreamily within the composition's twists and turns.
On exploring another route to represent identity, Takemura conceived the deconstruction of masks, investigating the notions of protection and disguise, especially since the pandemic. For a long time, masks have also held a cultural context worldwide, having been used extensively in Japanese festivals and performances to partly conceal, exaggerate changing emotions, and to mimic spiritual, animal, and living forms. His take on this prevailing signature comprises the use of triangular pieces of dichroic glass, a material with contrasting transmissive and reflective properties. Each piece in the mosaic represents our memories and experiences, how each of them reflects a different colour to the viewer and transmits a different colour to the wearer, alluding to the notion of our world being a mirror and the variable nature of reality. "I can observe segments of my face which are reference points to individual memories from my past as well as the world around me—these segments are pieced together and as a whole, they form my identity," explains the installation artist. He tries to mirror the flawed nature of self-perception and the nature of our mind to reinterpret memories.
To expand on this imagination, the Japanese artist has created an art installation replete with dichroic glass segments, fragmented, yet appearing fused, to reflect the scattered memories outside of logic or time, that one collects to form a whole, to construct ourselves. This work also reflects Takemura contemplating his own life and personal memories, reimagining notions of visual perception and self-illusion, and encouraging self-introspection.
Yusuke Takemura’s 'Connectivity' is on view from June 9 - July 9, 2023, at the Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Australia.
(Text by Aatmi Chitalia, Intern at STIR)
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