Akane is a versatile, many-sided artist who has managed to keep to a steady rhythm in her work without sacrificing intensity. The poetic and existential density underlying her work enfolds viewers, awakening sensations in them and transporting them to spheres of reality that transcend cultural differences.
The artist's previous work had already revealed her concern to link the microcosmos and the macrocosmos and the mysterious synchronicities that weave together the past, the present and the future with invisible threads. In the series of photographs she is now presenting, she moves along the fissures that bring us closer to states of consciousness which escape the control of reason and enable us to find in everyday things an area of transit to the infinite. Rather than an end in itself, artistic style is a means of gaining access to states of rapt attention that can usually be achieved only by deep sessions of meditation or by the dissociative abandon that sometimes occurs in quite banal situations, such as listening to rain or watching television.
The images presented in this exhibition shows how cities dream, and how within the banality of everyday things there lie a poetry that can carry us off towards other worlds. The black-and-white series "Cityscapes" brings out the magic of the large city, freezing it in order to offer it to our glance. The images of the series "Tokyo Highway Cruise" are color photos of headlamps and lights meeting each other in a night drive along the motorway. "Escape" shows the exit from a city in the rain. Originally shot on video and later printed on photographic paper, these series speak to us not only of the physical, mental and emotional shifts of the journey but also of the crossovers between different artistic means: the video, more closely bound up with capturing movement, and photography, more concerned with seizing an instant.
Asaoka suspends time and plunges us into the magma of the cosmic unconscious that inhabits our most ordinary environments. In her work, she creates scenarios that open doors for us onto a melancholy that is tied to the awareness of the passage of time, or onto the emptiness that comes in the wake of a loss. Nevertheless, her pictures are not sad, and do not sink irrevocably into nostalgia. She is strongly charged with hope, with a firm confidence regarding what lies ahead of us. They are pictures that seek to take us a little farther, that bring about states of distancing and that make us aware of the infinite distance that inhabits all that is closest to us. That is why they affect us, bringing us the bittersweet taste of a journey of sentiment.
Rosa Martinez Barcelona, May 2000
Art Critic, independent curator and artistic director of the1st Kathmandu Biennial
The shimmering effect of the lights, which move along, leaving a trail of identical marks behind them, is a recurrent device in the work of Akane Asaoka. These empty spaces punctuated by small points of light are not recognisable as real spaces. The exact location of each one of those lights gets lost and becomes equidistant from the viewer. The space thus created by these images is a space of transition: it is the instant when sight goes out of focus.
In the same way as we achieve abstraction from the objects before us in order to better concentrate on the images of our own thought processes, these spaces portrayed by Akane are, perhaps, the last image of the real world before we concentrate on our own flux of ideas. Therefore, this is an "image in suspension." It is at this point that our powers of concentration are dispersed. If we move forward, our gaze meets a world of objects, which gain definition as we go closer. Moving backwards, brings us into a brief moment of introspection that may have caught us alert and fully conscious.
In this way concentration and abstraction are entwined in a visual blur which makes everything fade away. It would be an interesting experiment to record the different steps of the process with which the body and above all the eyes can transport us to a private space even in the midst of a crowd. Losing sight of the outside world means withdrawing into a space in which the focus on the ordinary train of events is arrested whilst the level on which ideas, emotions and moods exist takes on a new life. The blurred image of the lights merely indicate a moment of transition which Akane freezes and prolongs whilst she isolates you from the reality you perceived before and which presumably she will return you to.
This interior space where introspection takes us, often takes the form of a domestic space, conveniently furnished for the body to rest in. A common set up, which facilitates allowing yourself to concentrate on yourself, is often a sitting room with a television set. Once the outside world is out of sight we gain a space for meditation.
Carles Guerra Barcelona, March, 2000
Art critic and independent Curator