Suspended Figure, Another Geography and Diesel Denim?

The Diesel Denim Gallery Tokyo has two levels. The first floor store features installations from local artists to renew the store’s look every six months and the second floor gallery showcases four works a year, also by local artists. Being from a business background, I find this a very innovative concept in line with the Diesel’s culture of creativity and unconventional thinking. Combining the artist’s work with the fashion collection puts the focus less on the functionality of the clothes and more on their status as art objects. Conversely, the use of the store as a platform to display the work of artists is mutually beneficial for both the store and the artist.

From what I had read about Ayako Maruta’s Suspended Figure, the main draw for me was that the artist has suspended lights and cables in such a way as to create arches — I was looking forward to witnessing something that defied the architectural convention of arches being built up from the ground. However my initial impression was one of confusion: the lightbulbs at the bottom of the installation’s ‘columns’ were obscured by the clothing displays, making it a little hard to get a sense of the structure’s grounding at first. Although the store as a whole had a striking contemporary Gothic feel to it, I nevertheless felt a little disappointed. The installation would have had more impact if there were a more spacing between it and the fashion collection. But then again, Diesel is first and foremost a clothing store.

In the gallery upstairs, however, Kimihiko Odaka’s Another Geography was very impressive. It felt like entering a cave made of foil rather than rock. With the gallery littered with bundles of metal tumbleweed, each illuminated by a mixture of warm and cool colored light bulbs, this store had transformed itself into a space-age terrain. The play of light on the shiny surfaces everywhere was particularly striking: not only did the colored light from within the tumbleweed reflect off the foil hanging above, but there was also a variety of colored LED flashlights provided for visitors to shine as they pleased on the ceiling. It was this striking by day, so oh what a sight it must be in the evening.