Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Hiraki Sawa
Active stillness
Hiraki Sawa’s video animations are eloquent reflections on ideas of
time and motion, home and place. Having lived in both London and
Kanazawa for many years, the themes of travel, mobility and distance
are important references for Sawa, and his works transport ordinary
objects into the realms of the subconscious and the surreal. Recurrent
motifs include aircraft, Ferris wheels and rocking horses, which trace
journeys ‘from one place to another, and back again’. 1
Sawa’s recent works are immersive, spatial installations of image and
sound which explore concepts of abstract motion or ‘active stillness’. 2
Hako 2006 is a six-channel work tracing changes in the landscape
through the imagery of a nuclear power station, model domestic
interiors, and an ancient Shinto shrine that is rebuilt every 20 years. 3
Out of the blue 2009 is a two-channel video installation. One is a
sequential narrative of shadows cast by isolated objects in a domestic
space, the other is a single continuous shot of people walking languidly
up and down a steep sand dune, its measured tracking shots in slow
motion highlighting the physical and perceptual interactions that occur
in one’s passage through a particular terrain.
as a whole and the minute and intricate details, where countless
patterns are revealed.
Complementing the vast, unpeopled spaces of the desert are scenes
of the dusty interiors of an abandoned house:
There is a home in the mountains near the river near the sea. It is tall
and it is old and its floors are of cracked, red clay. It is full of things in
piles and heaps and layers, yet empty of both absence and presence.
It has known too many people and framed too many lives to be
missing only one of these. 6
This focus on a neglected domestic space, once occupied and lively,
reflects on the cycles of life, and is augmented by an enchanting
exploration of the surface of the moon as it orbits the earth. Sawa’s ten
short films in O 2009 feature individual objects — a glass bottle, a brass
bell, a china bowl — which endlessly spin; an action which contradicts
their purpose. The china bowl jerkily rotating on its base, for example,
is an incongruous and comical inversion of its function.
Commissioned for APT6, O 2009 is a multi-channel installation
featuring a soundtrack by London-based composer Dale Berning.
It builds on the artist’s interest in journeys and cycles, while also
considering expression as a continuous flow, using the circle as a
poignant visual metaphor. The work is comprised of ten short films of
spinning objects, as well as a three-channel projection which traverses
the moon’s surface, the empty interiors of an abandoned house, and
the vast expanses of the Central Australian desert, which Sawa visited
in April 2009. Tracing a circuit starting and ending in Alice Springs,
Sawa travelled between the rust red ranges and the bleached spinifex
terrain of the desert landscape:
Hiraki Sawa’s emphasis on action over narrative creates an absorbing
and compelling study of momentum and balance, continuity and
repetition. The soundtrack reinforces the non-linearity of his
approach. It is a composition of spinning sounds and silences
played on rotating speakers. As Sawa says, ‘Coming full circle is
movement without displacement. In that time, you simply are, and
all change is in the looking’. 7
Mellissa Kavenagh
Hiraki Sawa
Japan/United Kingdom b.1977
O (stills) 2009
3 channel video projection, 10 short films on monitors,
5 channel sound by Dale Berning on spinning
speakers, colour and black and white, 8.00 minutes /
Commissioned for APT6 / Images courtesy: The artist
A round trip takes you on the same route twice but in opposite
directions. You end up where you began, and in between nothing
takes place. You drive up a road and see the world on either side as
it is. Driving back down again covers the same ground, the world
on either side does not move or change, yet seen from behind,
everything is different. I am interested in this active stillness . . . 4
Towards the end of his journey, Sawa encountered the ancient
meteorite crater of Tnorala (Gosse Bluff), a place of cultural
significance to the Western Arrernte people, as well as a site of
international scientific interest. 5 The projection depicts a bird circling
low over the seabed, as a tugboat travels across the frame against a
background of spinning wind turbines. The crater is depicted from
above, revealing the mounds and cracks in the rock walls. Inherent in
this sequence is the artist’s focus on the elemental: the wind, the sea
and the earth, all moving in an unbroken flow. Images of swaying grass
and rippling clouds shift the viewer’s focus between the composition
Endnotes
1 Hiraki Sawa, artist statement in an email to the author, 18 September 2009.
2 Sawa, artist statement.
3 The Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, is completely reconstructed every 20 years as part
of the Shinto belief in the cycle of renewal in nature; it is also a way of passing
building techniques from one generation to the next.
4 Sawa, artist statement.
5 Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) is an ancient site over 142 million years old, and is located
175 kilometres west of Alice Springs. According to both Aboriginal culture and
scientific interpretation, the site is celestial in origin.
6 Sawa, artist statement.
7 Sawa, artist statement.
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