Posts Tagged ‘Japan’

Christian Houge lives and works in Oslo, Norway. His work has been exhibited at ParisPhoto, PhotoLondon and ArtBasel, as well as solo shows both in London, Oslo, New York and San Francisco.  Christian Houge has created a new body of work; Okuriomono.  With Okuriomono, Christian Houge guides us into a mystery between the ritualized shapes of the traditional Zen garden in Kyoto and the equally ritualized spaces of futuristic, urban Tokyo.  Both past and future Japan are explored and the contrasts are striking but alarmingly similar.  I found Christian’s images intriguing.

Excerpt by Erling Bugge: “…Christian Houge guides us into a mystery. For a westerner, Japan might look familiar, since what is held up for us looks like a futuristic spectacle somehow grounded in a western imagination. This judgment, however, is too easy. In Houge’s photographs, the sense of sameness withdraws and a very different feeling of strangeness creeps up on us. In fact, what this series registers is a remarkable place of alterity in today’s global order, a radical difference bang in the middle of the familiar.

This is pushed to the limit in the technological and virtual wonderland of Akihabara in Tokyo, where shop after shop trades in electronic products and computer games, while a weird costume play, “cosplay”, is being performed in the streets. A similar kind of simulation is being acted out in the district of Harajuku, where Houge found some of his motifs. There is no authenticity here, no western “essence” or “reality”; instead, the virtual conquers the carnal body in a purified play of surface, image and the hyperreal. This is exotic. All the while as we are conscious of these notions as pinnacle points in a western idea of the post-modern. But in this sense Japan has always been “post-modern”. It has always integrated the most refined culture and technology from the outside while somehow retained an identity for itself. So, what would this identity be? Houge takes the view of ritual and play. Indeed, Japanese culture seems to be grounded solely on ritual, in business and in sex, in its relation to nature and in religion….”

More photographs at Christian Houge web site.