Materials and Boundaries: Handiwirman Saputra + Chiba Masaya (review)

Enshrined in a gallery of the Mori Art Museum, standing against a backdrop of the Tokyo cityscape, were two sculptures whose strange forms defied description. These artworks, which Handiwirman Saputra calls “object art,” achieved new life through the unknown combination of known materials and receiving shape and transformed the space in which they were placed into something unrealistic. On the wall to the left was a painting by Chiba Masaya, Pork Part #4 (2016), and, on the right, Powerful Young Boy at 2013 (2013) and three related drawings. The various items in Chiba’s paintings, carefully positioned by the artist’s superb brushwork according not only to texture but also to mass, are re-creations of objects and situations that the artist actually made. What these two artists share in their practice is the way that they handle substances that exist in reality and how they nullify or change meaning and context, metaphysically transforming the reality that surrounds the viewer.

Handiwirman’s object is not a medium between mankind and matter. It appears before us as an absolute Other. The pale pink resin and artificial turf covering that can be seen in Menahan Letakan Di Bawah Sangkutan (Holding Base Below Hook) (2011–2014), whose shape recalls a rock or an iceberg tip, evokes the cross section of a body or skin. The round and soft texture of Tak Berakar Tak Berpucuk Nom. 12 (No Roots, No Shoots No. 12) (2011) at first seems organic and almost comedic. And yet both appear to connote something inscrutable. At the same time, they are hard, cold, and heavy objects that immediately betray such subjective conjecture, visually

Figure 1.

Installation view at MAM Collection 006: Materials and Boundaries—Handiwirman Saputra + Chiba Masaya, Mori Art Museum, 2017. Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photograph by Hasegawa Kenta.

Figure 2.

Handiwirman Saputra, installation view at MAM Collection 006: Materials and Boundaries—Handiwirman Saputra + Chiba Masaya, Mori Art Museum, 2017. Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photograph by Hasegawa Kenta.

penetrated by their materiality. What Handiwirman’s object art brings about is the metaphysical transformation of reality through the mismatch of the subjective projection and actual perception of the viewer toward the artwork as well as the reintegration of the experience of the artwork that occurs cerebrally. That transformation causes confusion in our perception as we try to visually confirm the presence of the work, extending our understanding of form, materiality, mass, and space.

As Chiba starts from his own sense of touch and real-life experiences, the reality of the motifs is narrowly maintained in his painting. By shifting the original meaning and context of the motifs, his paintings attain a fictional nature quite distinct from the types of new figurative paintings that have become popular since the 1990s, as represented by such artists as the Scottish painter Peter Doig, with whose work Chiba’s has been compared. Although partly inspired by the belief in the Sasurai Jizo (Wandering Ksitigarbha) in Tōno, Iwate Prefecture, Powerful Young Boy at 2013 does not create a new narrative based on folklore but is rather the amplification and purification of fictionality through the nonsensical treatment of adaptation and faith systems. The manipulation of Chiba’s visual and tactile experiences can be regarded as the mechanics of surrealism. This destroys the gravity inside the painting through the combination of the unknown, establishing an illusionary effect. Derived from things that once actually existed, Chiba’s paintings encourage the viewer to go back in time from what is depicted on the surface, as if to arrive at his afterthoughts. Although Handiwirman’s methodology is a paradoxical one that metaphysically transforms the reality of a location manifested by the object, Chiba questions the existing reality of the past and the present. Put differently, both artists’ approaches resonate with each other in the sense that they attempt to speak...