phantom limb
The challenge of representing visually intangible aspects of human experience has long preoccupied painters, sculptors and photographers. In seeking to give form to sensation or emotion, many European artists have relied on an expressive, abstract language of colour and form. However, in his large scale solo exhibition, Phantom Limb, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the contemporary Japanese artist Odani Motohiko uses sculpture and installation to rise spectacularly to this challenge.
Phantom Limb is named after the peculiar occurrence, much studied by phenomenologists, in which amputees continue to feel pain, itching or tingling in their missing limb, as though it is still there. The diverse, superbly executed sculptural, installation and video works in this exhibition examine how experiences may similarly differ from observed ‘reality’. To Odani, modern Japanese figurative sculpture is too often limited to surface appearances and fails to explore what lies beneath: it is ‘a zombie-like field that continues to exist despite the fact that it is dead’. Not only does his work represent the invisible aspects of life, it generates a range of indefinable and often overwhelming experiences for viewers.
A particularly compelling, mesmerizing work is Odani’s video installation, Inferno (2008–2010). Standing in an octagonal room on a highly polished reflective floor and beneath a mirrored ceiling, viewers are enveloped by an eight screen multi-channel synchronised projection of tumbling water. The rumbling sound and the infinite reflections of the surging water above and below create an utterly immersive space. When the pace of the waterfall is in turn quickened and slowed, a disorienting out of body experience is generated, as though we are being forced up weightlessly through the raging water.
Several works occupy an unsettling