The New Year marks a new beginning: new outfit styles, new artworks, new routine plans, yet we always find ourselves end up somewhere different than where we planned to be: cottage-core turned out to be minimalist, sculptures grew into installations, 6:00am skincare routine morphed into 6:00am daily workout, or maybe 6:00pm Sunday ice-cream. Our life seems to be a mélange of carefully calculated actions and unexpected, almost surreal encounters. It may seem boring, all the idle moments waiting for the take-out donut, the wasted time in a bar, but from time to time, amidst our busy lives, we experience some indescribable emotions, like the ones Kandinsky painted in his works. All these actions and emotions and time and everything constitutes our life, this uncontrollable life of chaos, which is what Aki Sasamoto seeks to explore in her artworks.
Squirrel Ways, 2021, installation and performance
Aki Sasamoto is a Japanese-American artist known for her interdisciplinary performances, videos, and installations. In an interview with the New York Times, she asserted that her artworks are “simply an excuse to do whatever [she wants] to do, usually [she has] a question or something that [she is] wondering about”.
Her works are like a microcosm of life itself: full of calculated chaos. In Centripetal Run, Sasamoto and her crew perform a series of seemingly unrelated actions in her installation, from playing a saxophone, guitar, and drum simultaneously to ranting about the origins of the universe, but in the end, every miscellaneous detail ties together to the idea of commitment, both in art and to the choice of underwear.
Centripetal Run, 2012, installation and performance
The centrifugal nature (although the work is titled Centripetal Run) is as if the artist is visually thinking as the work progresses, connecting ideas from various disciplines all back to the centre point. This sense of unexpected, amusing, almost surreal fascination is what Sasamoto draws from her seemingly mundane life. Standing on this blurred line between performance and installation, Sasamoto takes an artistic approach to life that endows it a constant reflection and inspiration.
Centripetal Run, 2012, installation and performance
Two objects, or forms, seem to dominate her work: donuts and pipes, both cylindrical with holed centres.
Donut Diagram, 2018, video
She questions if the human body can be described as a pipe and if one can eat a donut inside-out—peculiar approaches to seemingly boring objects that explore not only the experiences of living but also delve beyond the mundane superficial life and discover the little wonders, sparks of child-like, innocent imaginations inherently instinctive to humans.
Centripetal Run, 2012, installation and performance
Spirits Cubed, 2020, installation
Circle also reoccurs in her artworks. Kandinsky too had a strong feeling for the use of circles in his paintings. Perhaps for Sasamoto, the circle is also a metaphor for her life as a cycle, but also one that elicits unconscious emotions in the audience based on shared human experiences. Sasamoto’s artworks provoke inner reflection from the audience, as she does not directly express her ideas but invites the viewers to engage with her installation and performances, like in Wrong Happy Hour.
Wrong Happy Hour, 2014, installation and performance
When the back wall moves to squish all the viewers outside of the pub, the audience becomes a part of Sasamoto’s performance, and through this involvement and interaction with the artist and the artwork, the viewers are physically and emotionally evoked to explore the same themes the artist might be looking at.
The Last Call, 2015, installation and performance
Her own body, too, is also an essential part of her performances as she interacts with the sculptures she makes. Sasamoto’s body is both a basis of resonance, as the human body is a collective experience, and an unique voice, for through her own body, Sasamoto tells her own stories and expresses her own feelings.
Sunny in the Furnace, 2014, installation and performance
Again, the human body is a mundane part of daily life, a neglected vehicle for thoughts and actions, but by incorporating the body into her installations, Sasamoto almost questions the boundaries between the body and the sculptures she interacts with: when does the body become an object?
Delicate Cycle, 2016, installation
The materials in Sasamoto’s art are also an important aspect to her exploration. She was diagnosed with a kidney condition that prevented her from drinking for months. Immediately after, she found out she was pregnant, completely unplanned. Past in a Future Tense explores this unexpectedness in life. Sasamoto designed and created her own whisky glasses, melting and manipulating a material difficult to manipulate. The process and struggle to create her design resembles the tension between the controlled and uncontrolled chaos in her work and life.
Past in a Future Tense, 2019, installation
Aki Sasamoto making a whisky glass
In her more recent work, Phase Transition, a theatre production, Sasamoto uses weather as another metaphor for her exploration of life. Weather is something in the background of people’s lives, but with Sasamoto’s addition of sculptural installations, stage-settings, and performances, the constantly changing air, wind, and clouds become like the constantly shifting stages of life.
Phase Transition, 2020, theatre production
Taking inspiration from her daily life—drinking, pregnancy, laundry, all the chores and events that seem so mundane, she instills snippets of her own life, both internal emotions and external sensations, into her art. Through this, she gives the inanimate objects life, a life taken from her own. From here, her objects go on to live their life with their own logics, their own rhythms, and their own heartbeat. Sasamoto’s carefully-calculated manipulated objects that ironically, ultimately results in a chaotic, uncontrollable system of their own. The life she endowed her sculptures becomes an utterly new one. In a way, by blending her personal life with art, Sasamoto gives herself a new life, one that is mundane but fascinating, calculated but chaotic. Perhaps art is not creation in isolation, but an attitude to see the little wonders of living.
Squirrel Ways, 2021, installation and performance
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