© TSUDA Michiko
Photo: YAMAMOTO Tadasu

20th Art Division New Face Award

You would come back there to see me again the following day.

Media installation

TSUDA Michiko [Japan]

Outline

This installation utilizes mirrors and video cameras combined with various types of frame, a motif often discussed in the context of the history of painting and film. The title is a typical English sentence in free indirect speech (by what is normally a third-person subject). With the object of “there” and “following day” varying with the context, this title reflects the experience of viewers, whose relationship to their image and to the space raises questions about the meaning of “here” and “now.” Among the 12 frames suspended from the ceiling, some enclose a mirror or a screen, while others are empty. The screens may display a real-time video, or footage of the exhibition space shot 24 hours earlier. The viewer proceeds through a labyrinth of images—in mirrors, in screens, and in real life outside the frames—all the while observing protean changes in the relationship between the self and the space.

Reason for Award

Once we insert ourselves into the installation, we are likely to keep walking around and around amid this quiet forest of frames. That’s because the work has the power to pose a fundamental question about images: Why does the world we can see beyond the frame only shine for us when we enclose it? Thanks to this simple but brilliant contrivance, the experience of peering into a frame and seeing one’s own back expands the dimensions of our very frame of thinking. As our real physical experiences are replicated, we find ourselves living in tomorrow within the frame. The installation is admirable for its freshness, tension, and profundity. (ISHIDA Takashi)