Century Gallery
ACAVA, 1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
Contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery
 
Crystal & silver
June 4-14, 2003
Tomonori Nishimura
| paintings | space 3
I see crystals as a model of natural regularity. The naturally formed arrangement of the molecules displays a well-ordered regularity. This suggests to me the process of self-organizing systems such as communities. Individuals, as the components of a social system, determine the possibility of social organizations, though each individual is too weak to conduct the process of organization. The system organizes by itself, somewhat naturally and regularly.

According to the philosophical tradition of dualism, some concept pairs are involved in the process of making art, such as nature/culture, body/spirit, simple/complex, conceptual/visual, and so on. In my art I start with opposites, then I bring them closer and make compounds of them: I do not emphasize the opposition but rather try to nullify it.

Metals and plants may teach us something about the relationship between our biosphere and the ideology of ecology. The properties of metals — strong, hard, conductive, easy to process, quantitative — have been useful to mankind from the outset. On the other hand, plants heal us biologically and psychologically. Ecology may be seen as the opposition between metals and plants. I combine my sensations of metals and plants in this series of art works.