Hidemi Nishida Fragile Chair installation – All photos: courtesy of Hidemi Nishida.
Japan – Tokyo-based artist and architect Hidemi Nishida built Fragile Chairs, an environmental installation merging with the surrounding natural landscape: from morning mist to twilight striking contrasts. At night, the seats are lit from below the water surface creating a silent poetic scenery.
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The Fragile Chairs installation features tens of wooden chairs float on the Poroto holy lake in Hokkaido in Northern Japan referring to the intimate home environment of Ainu indigenous people. Northern land Hokkaido is the main habitat of Ainu indigenous people and the Lake Poroto has been a one of their biggest and most ancient villages. Today the it is partly kept as a museum, and many tourists are coming to experience the Ainu culture.
“The emerging chairs on the water silently imply an existence of a field where a human cannot really reach to.” Says Hidemi Nishida to Archipanic. “It somehow visualizes such a distance between the invisible field and our ordinary field being a medium to connect them.”
Photo by The Ainu Museum
Silence is a key concept of the installation. Today, the lake is still a Ainu sanctuary and it has been seeing Hokkaido’s turbulent time change in silence. The Fragile Chairs installation aims to remind us that “our ordinary exists in the contrast with the long-distance view. It throws a time to face the unseen world or landscape into today’s hasty time flow.”
Tokyo-based artist and architect Hidemi Nishida engages space aesthetics, poetics and perception of environment through his work. “I research a primordial experience of surroundings to lead people into flesh experience making them aware of new sense of perception”. Nishida’s work some how visualize elements of ordinary view and questions that how do you contact with the beautiful world. And how do you define your life, your individual.
All photos: courtesy of Hidemi Nishida.
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