Ignacio Adriasola Associate Professor, The University of British Columbia
Yumi Kōri notes that any architect can speak to the weight of line—the heaviness attached to drawing it, for example on a napkin, sketchpad, or a plan. In such setting, line is never just contour or form. It is a border or division—perhaps a wall—and as such, materials, costs, as well as a determination regarding how space is to be experienced by its users.
On the blank canvas provided by a sandy beach, that line drawn with a stick or finger translates concept into matter. Kōri’s environment Border likewise explores the work of line in space. Line, her experiment reveals, is a gesture that partitions or apportions still-formless possibility.
Located in a quiet and narrow backstreet, an old machiya cannily blends in with its surroundings. Its lights are out, and windows shuttered; an inadvertent passerby would be hard pressed to imagine anything noteworthy happening inside. The converted building is a gallery located in Karahorichō, an ancient district in Osaka. The name Karahorichō refers to an open moat, whose ruins structure the neighborhood. The stone walls still standing flank steep inclines in this otherwise mostly flat port city. The moat was a defensive structure dating to the times of Hideyoshi. Now its ruinous walls continue to section off the city and shape the residents’ experience of space, through shifting textures and density. These walls similarly give form to something like an invisible line—a barely noticeable border between inside and outside, past and present.
Pulling the door open and drawing back a heavy curtain, the viewer enters what initially appears to be a completely dark room. Black light set at barely perceptible luminance is the sole light source. The darkness is so stark that it takes a good couple of minutes for the eye to adjust. A droning noise floods the space: a dissonant chord generates subtle beats and is overlayed with a recording of crashing waves. Slowly, as the viewer shifts and adapts to the dim lighting, lines unexpectedly appear. At times white, purple, or blue, they form two suspended rectangles that float and intersect.
Compared to the complex operation staged by the artist—the sequence of events leading to this suspended apparition—the construction itself is remarkably simple and frail. White acrylic yarn has been tensed into shape and held in place, with clear thread carefully tacked at discrete points onto the walls. One rectangle is elevated at a few centimeters above the ground; the edges of the second have been deliberately fixed at an ever-so-slight tilt, enhancing the structure’s sense of precariousness. Intersecting at an angle, they dynamically engage the surroundings. The black light bounces off the yarn drawing a fluorescent geometry in open space.
The darkness forces viewers to stop. They must wait to see the structure, and only then can examine it in its relationship to space. The background drone highlights the durational aspect of this process, honing their attention. Suddenly aware of their situation as viewers in relation to space and structure, time comes to a grinding halt.
The work invites layered meanings, and possible references abound—but none fully contain it. Visually, the structure evokes the legacies of geometric abstraction; it also recalls the art of light and movement, as well as textile art. As with Anni and Josef Albers’s ink drawings and dark geotectonic prints, the structure produces a repeating wireframe figure that hovers against negative space. In this sense, it suggests an investigation of the figure-ground relation, playing with the viewer’s equivocal perception of depth. Like Dan Flavin’s light sculptures, subtle shifts in the simple forms and colors irritate the eye, as it looks for certainty and clarity in its object. In its most literal sense, the structure might appear like a large-scale weaving or textile installation—somewhat like Lygia Pape’s Ttéias—although beside the immediate materials, there is no obvious reference to textile as medium or tradition. The form might remind one of ayatori—some oversized version of the cat’s cradle, which traps the viewer.
However, such similarities are mere surface effects. One can tentatively walk around and through the form—circle and traverse it. Likewise, rather than light and color, we are forced to think about their absence, or the conditions in which qualities become perceptible. And the openings the structure encloses are immense—this is clearly not a weaving or a net. Maybe in terms of its spatial manipulation the effect of Borders comes closest to Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture, albeit in a subtler, infinitely more delicate and fragile intervention than the ones seen in his famous building cuts. Indeed, Kōri similarly produces a defamiliarizing reconfiguration of space. But rather than deconstructing the pre-existing built environment, her aim here is ultimately for the viewer to inhabit space, experiencing borders and the in-between.
In this work line is just incidentally a grapheme. Neither fully trace nor word, the lines drawn mid-air suggest divisions discovered and traversed by the viewer—just like residents cross the moat the gallery sits within. Like the moat, the work’s lines demarcate a transition between here and there.
Asked about her immediate motive for the work, Kōri speaks of her experience of bereavement. The artist devised Borders after losing her mother and her aunt in quick succession. Framing these experiences of loss, were invisible walls erected to keep us all safe from each other—seeking what some euphemistically called “together-apart.”
Suddenly visible to us in the estranged conditions of the pandemic, borders of many kinds—social, cultural, physical—appear as an increasingly prominent feature of society today. Kōri is concerned with borders that are erected with the purpose to separate or obscure: to not-see, to not-touch, to fix-in-place. However, her work transcends the immediacy of its context. She successfully speaks not only to the border as a general condition or limit, but also to the possibilities enabled by the in-between. Stand across the line, Kōri insistently tells viewers. Be both inside and outside at once. In her work, borders modulate, as well as constrict. In this suspended space, the threadbare line and open walls are equally border and threshold at once.
Yumi Kōri, Borders. 25 January – 12 February 2023. Gallery +1 Art, Osaka.
