present tense
The images of the recent exhibition Zones of Love-Contemporary Art from Japan reflected an intriguing visual juxtaposition, which raised questions about cultural identity and cross-cultural expectation. The familiar iconography of international consumer culture that one associates with most large urban centres was very much in evidence, but was inflected with a local and alien trace which actually emphasized for me a sense of distance and remoteness. So while there was an immediate comprehension of the bold surfaces of the images, access to their productive centres was difficult.
Dumb Type's performance pH however, had a profound effect on me. It brought home most forcefully the loss of the interpersonal in the sealed circuits and systems of international consumer society, questioning the terms of an ideal civilised life.
The projects of Dumb Type reflect on the condition of urban dwelling in contemporary Japan, where technology is often so omnipresent that it has the 'natural' status of raw material. In our cultural context where the appearance and use of technology still has a powerful semiotic currency in and of itself, this matter-of-factness toward the technological environment has an inescapably futuristic tint. However, it would seem that even in the advanced techno-human environments of urban Japan, a site within which the technological and the human agendas would be harmonious has as yet no rational form. So while pH reflects this relationship as well and truly established, it is inherently unreconciled and unresolved.
pH recreates the urban social space as tightly regimented and intensely claustrophobic. Within this space the everyday, sanitized environments of shopping centres, transit stations, television shows and various institutions of social management and control become fused and layered. The performance space is