Art Journal #48: Bones @ 21_21 Design Sight

Low expectation, great show. Honestly Midtown needs to put up a lot more show info on its site. I almost didnt go, given there's no description. Yes "Bones" is interesting in itself, but that's pretty much it on the website. You can say they are trying to not give it away too much...but if you dont sell, people dont go!

The show was fascinating. I left thinking that if West Kowloon had sth like this, we'd be set! (Pls just take the whole show and bring to HK). It's interactive, it's fun, it's not too avant garde. It's sth you can bring your whole family. Yes you can say it's more design than art, but who cares about the boundary! I think it's intersection of art and design, or you can call it digital art (reminded me of a Taiwan MOCA show). Great curating by Shunji Yamanaka, whos a designer who previously work at Nissan and now designs a range of products including the Suica system.

It's very interactive, started off with photos of animal skeletons by Eiji Yuzawa(no surprise there, you'd expect sth like that), then X-Ray photos of humans with digital gadgets by British Nick Veasey (so the gadgets' internal structures are all captured, very interesting). There's a corner that tear apart famous chairs down to their "bones" - the original supporting structure with the seats.

Then in the big hall, you have benches ("Galvanic Frame" by Mongoose Studio) that can "feel your pressure and express pain when you sit on them" through blinking LEDs at the joints, hence making a connection between human and objects. In various locations throughout the exhibition hall, there are panels done by a firm called Leading Edge Design where you can point and touch to call up the artwork description depending on how you switch the pointing positions - a bit like Microsoft's Surface, only even more futuristic almost like that in the Mission Impossible movie.

Kotaro Maeda's "endoskeleton spiders" (ie, spiders with bones) in the garden were very amusing and for a moment makes you think you got your science screwed up in your head (do spiders really have bones?!)

At the end of the hall, there is a machine that captures your shadows which then become skeletons and move on their own as they "come alive" (by Hisato Ogata and Takeo Igarashi, called "another shadow"). Finally there's the laughing, highly-designed but totally useless machine that is about nothingness by the designers at Maywa Denki (very smart and fun people!)

The exhibition concept of "bones" was made to be broad and provocative, bringing you down to thinking about how we move, how machines move, evolution of support structures like our bones and mechanics in cars, watches, etc., and how they all work in a seemingly effortless fashion which in fact is nothing short of a miracle.

I left thinking it's a "fun" exhibition theme, until I read Issey Miyake's opening note. The idea must have come from him - he talked about the theme of his design work and garments, which is all about how bodies move, how fabrics flow around a body, and how they move when different body parts move. He explores body movements, and the space between the body and the clothes he designs. Suddenly the theme of the show makes a world of sense!