A virtual dog virtually looks on at virtual figures in a very real room. Or are they virtual? In a brilliant exhibition called Geometric Reality artist Kato Toshihiko brings the purely mathematical into the physical realm. He builds figures in AutoCAD or a similar program using polygons - those straight-edged facets that you see in game-characters, ala Playstation and the like. He then prints out the plans of these characters and painstakingly makes them materialise by cutting out each polygon out of artboard and assembling them together like a 3 dimensional puzzle. The dog alone consists of over 800 pieces. This exhibition was held in a very cool independent gallery called Mssohkan (or Muso-kan... there seems to be 2 ways of writing it) which is run by a family near Kobe.



The wall out the front seems to break away accidentally.



But look up and you'll find the rest of the wall on the top of the building! A silver person looks coolly into the distance from behind silver driving sunglasses.





Inside Kato's genius becomes apparent. His static, yet dynamic figures have a strange life of their own, despite their cold, formulaic microchip origins.

The purity of tone on each plane makes them so photographable! They seem to be asking to be taken. I asked the lady on staff - the daughter - if I could take some photos and surprisingly her reply was "Of course!". Later I said I wanted to write a review of some sort on the internet (I admitted the smale scale of my intent) and she was very happy aboout it. Having said that, if I breach any kind of copyright in posting these pictures, I sincerely apologise.

She left me to take pictures at my leisure and went off to make me a cup of tea! This gallery only runs on sales, so the entry was free.

She was very enthusiastic in telling me about the artist and in answering all my questions (she spoke good English - I'm not that good at Japanese!) and seemed truly grateful for my visit which was really humbling considering it's obvious to Blind Freddie that I couldn't ever afford the pieces on offer.

This figure reminds me of the headless girl that dances around outside the cabin in Evil Dead: Dead By Dawn - a movie that is laughable now, but in my youth scared the stuffing out of me!

I'm imagining a whole Playstation Acropolis in Athens.

The relative weightlessness of this medium makes things like this possible. It plays games with the mind in what you're looking at - the type of image that you're used to seeing from behind the glass of a computer screen is tangible, touchable. (But I didn't touch it!)

Check out the way he's done the shoulder joint, the jawline, the ear. Awesome.

In a back room with very chic ship's-style windows (chosen by mother!), I was shown these amazing ceramic sculptures by young artist Hayashi Higeki. http://www.geocities.jp/sheceramic/koten2006ms.html

Hayashi brilliantly draws on the hyper-modern and traditions of Japanese folklore and ceramics-production (he's from ceramics region Minoh, where I previously took photos of a waterfall and monkey) to create these intriguing artworks. These pod contraptions are designed to recall the shape of a rabbit - just as in Western tradition there is a man on the moon, the Japanese see a couple of rabbits, beating rice to make the popular snack, mochi!

Open the pod and you find a baby. If you read the excellent critique in the above link, you'll learn that this baby is the one referred to in the old tale that tells of a baby sent from the moon, to be found by a woodsman when he cut a large stalk of bamboo. I'd seen such imagery before, but had no idea it was a lunar baby!

George Lucas eat your heart out. Remember that these are entirely made from kiln-fired clay.

My host told me that the artist examined over 500 babies' faces in order to come up with an "average" face - an "everyman" baby, if you will. I wish I could have seen the full exhibition of these figures, but I feel priveleged enough to have seen this much... and with a free cuppa to boot! The lady said, please tell your friends! So here I am, doing my best. (I have a feeling that they're kind of well-patronised though, with customers coming from Tokyo and overseas... but like I said, nice of her to welcome a schmuck like me. The baser side of me dreamt of wooing her only to give me the means to do hair-brained art without ever working a regular job again in my life! haha)

So...

If you've got some time to kill in Kobe, make sure you make your way to Mssohkan... or whatever it's called! Definitely worth making the effort.