VIDEO: Shinichi Maruyama at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Bruce Silverstein: Welcome to Bruce Silverstein Gallery where today we are looking at the works of Shinichi Maruyama, a Japanese artist from Nagano, Japan. While traditional photography depicts typically a single event at a moment and time, Schinichi’s work, in fact, depicts a sequence of events all accruing what seem to be simultaneously. There is no sense of beginning or end in this work, only a connection to movement and flow, and because of the technique where he’s taken ten thousand photographs and composited them, you have this incredible depth within the figure, almost a draping sense. This is a nude dancer, there is no clothing, there is nothing to drape, when you looking at it, it is the body form as it moves ritually depicted in the photograph and what ends up happening is while we are looking at series of movements in the end we have this single form that has such a sculptural quality, beautiful light and all the various skin tones that are mixed and blended together. That creates something that is completely new, something that we’ve never seen before.

This would be our third exhibition of Shinichi’s works. His earlier body of work was entitled Kusho, which translates to writing in the sky. Kusho were images of water and ink colliding in the air. Unlike Kusho, which is photographs that’ve been taken at roughly ten thousand’s of a second depicting a single collision, the nudes are, in fact, ten thousand photographs taken over roughly two to four seconds, and the artist has superimposed those images to create a single form.

While tradition plays an important role in Shinichi’s work, his interest in calligraphy, his interest in Buddhism, certainly, the history of art is relevant. In this work he talk about Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which was created in 1912, roughly a hundred years ago, and in that painting the nude is depicted multiple times in deferent stages walking down the staircase. And in this work Shinichi attempted to also accomplish capturing movement without a before, a middle or an end. All of it happening simultaneously, so this is a bit of a nod to Duchamp.

This article and video interview © galleryIntell. Photographs © Shinichi Maruyama and provided courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery.

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