Online handout
IMAMURA Ryosuke × MITSUSHIMA Takayuki―Research Project on the Senses Any Point “Ｐ” in the Domain of Sensations

Foreword

　Tokyo Shibuya Koen-dori Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by artist IMAMURA Ryosuke and blind artist MITSUSHIMA Takayuki, supplemented by a report on the results of their researches on sensory perceptions.
　The two artists, who are of different generations and production styles, began a dialogue around 2022. Examining their shared experiences, they have taken note of differences in their sensory perceptions as individual artists, during those experiences, and pursued new artistic expression born from the differences. Seeking to widely share their activities with others, the Shibuya Koen-dori Gallery in Tokyo held a pre-event in May 2024 featuring works from their previous exhibition “IMAMURA Ryosuke × MITSUSHIMA Takayuki: Kankaku no Hate - Beyond the Extremity of the Senses” (Atelier MITSUSHIMA Sawa-Tadori) held in Kyoto in 2023, along with a new work entitled Tactile Table created collaboratively by Imamura and Mitsushima for use in a workshop.
　The present exhibition, then, traces the two artists’ trajectory until now through new works they have since developed—including installations created for the venue by Imamura and video shot by Mitsushima (with editing by Imamura) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and in the Dogenzaka area of Shibuya. Also exhibited is the artists’ record of more than 10 research projects. The installation pieces by Imamura arrayed in three galleries and touchable relief-like works by Mitsushima are exhibits that viewers can intuitively enjoy. During the exhibition period, people active in various fields will be invited as guests and a number of participatory programs held.
　Through sensory perceptions—our inner responses to external stimuli—we have contact with the world at large sensed and perceived by others. By assembling numerous different viewpoints in this exhibition—those of the exhibiting artists, other artists, researchers, athletes, invited guests, and everyone coming to the venue—we want to enable visitors to “sense” the sensory perceptions of others and discover possibilities for creative expression in a world of many different personal values. We hope that as visitors engage in dialogue, look into their own hearts, and reflect on the theme, “each person’s different sensory perceptions,” they will have the opportunity to think about others close to them and distant from them.

　We would like to express our gratitude to the artists for exhibiting their valuable works and our appreciation to everyone whose advice and cooperation helped make this exhibition a reality.

February 2025
Tokyo Shibuya Koen-dori Gallery
Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture

Any Point “P” in the Domain of Sensations

"Point P" is a temporary symbol used often in math problems. A point P is not an area but only a position, perceived as moving at a constant speed on a line segment. For this exhibition, I liken this arbitrary point P to “a person's unique sensory perception.” Both loosely have in common an aspect of being part of a function.

When a point P is given a specific position or movement, the time of something or area of some place is determined. Similarly, when our body has contact with a certain stimulus, we feel a particular sensation. In both cases, when a specific content is given to a “sensation” or a “point P,” it performs a role in a function disclosing something else.

Ryosuke Imamura and Takayuki Mitsushima are both artists who actively create and show their work. In their collaborative exhibition “Ryosuke Imamura × Takayuki Mitsushima: Kankaku no Hate - Beyond the Extremity of the Senses” held in Kyoto in 2023, they exhibited their research on the senses, conducted by regularly meeting to exchange everyday sensory perceptions catching their attention, along with artworks born from their research.

Each person has their own sensory perception function. Hence, even when receiving the exact same stimulus, their perception of the sensation produced will differ slightly from that of other people. The function in this case is sensitivity. Artworks arising from Imamura’s and Mitsushima’s experiences of the same sensations differ because the two artists have different sensitivities. One is sighted and one is visually impaired, this being a distinction that yields immeasurable complexity.

The present exhibition’s aim is to involve numerous people in Imamura and Mitsushima’s research project while maintaining that complexity as is. By observing the process of sensory perception in others, we can surmise a particular individual’s sensitivity. That experience then stimulates and clarifies our own function, which has appeared vague to us until now.

In a space, individually located point Ps will move independently, at times approaching each other and at times moving apart. Somewhere, an encounter with a point Q representing a different sensitivity, unseen before, might be waiting. We hope visitors will have opportunity to experience a variety of sensitivities differing from their own, through the sensory perception process occurring in Imamura’s and Mitsushima’s own experience and in the exhibition workshops.

Atelier Mitsushima
Yoko Takauchi

Artist Statement

IMAMURA Ryosuke

About three years ago, MITSUSHIMA Takayuki and I talked about doing an exhibition together. Instead of just simply displaying our works, we also decided to do something on the theme of sharing our sensory perceptions, about once a month. Since then, with varying frequency and intensity, we have continued to visit places intriguing to both of us and devise some kind of plan for drawing people around us into involvement.

These activities do not concern creating collaborative works. Neither do they concern sharing techniques for producing art. Rather, they are similar to, say, plowing a rice field. We plow each other's fields, exchange information about the fertilizer we use and kind of crops we are growing, and sometimes do experiments together. Then we go back and cultivate our own fields. Back at our studios, we are free to create our own separate works. If I was yet wondering why we somehow felt so far apart, it was because on a deeper level, our fields are so close they sit adjacent on either side of a raised path.

Since a child, I have wondered about the world we live in, fascinated by its strangeness. As I began to study art, I felt the freedom that art offered, and I have since created art with a desire to explore the environment of sights and sounds in actual places, and closely experience sudden smells and other uncertain sensory perceptions of the world. In some ways, Mitsushima likely perceives the world from a different angle than I and at a greater depth. I want to know what his perceptions are like. At the same time, as we discuss each other's works, I have learned that in many cases we see the world in exactly the same way.

For the pre-event last year in May, we created a table made of patchwork materials that elicit various tactile sensations, for use in a workshop. Participants were asked to touch the textures we arbitrarily patched together and tell us about memories that came to mind when touching them. This appeared to stir similar memories in other people sitting and listening at the same table, but not always, I think.

The way in which Mitsushima and I are adjacent to each other is simply one case. It is a way of being adjacent that enables us as fellow artists to communicate through art. Such a way of being adjacent surely exists in many forms in the world. We hope our case will stimulate people’s imaginations and plant seeds for fresh communication with others who are adjacent in some way difficult to discern.

MITSUSHIMA Takayuki

The special exhibition “Kankaku no Hate - Beyond the Extremity of the Senses” held in Kyoto in 2023. Next, we held a pre-event for the present exhibition in May 2024, where also we tried conducting a workshop using our Tactile Table. Based on these experiments in tactile expression, we hope to realize a new exhibition, this time.

As for my exhibited works this time, Outdoor Sculpture Seen by Hand is a video that offers an experience of “tactile time” that is like reading and understanding a book. Sayakani irotenji — From the Poems of Nakahara Chuya is a work visitors can view and touch. For Sayakani irotenji, I selected particularly impressive lines from the Nakahara Chuya poetry collection that I enjoyed in high school and presented them in artworks in the form of “colored braille” (irotenji). For example, the line, “Hmm, the sound of gravel felt lonely” (Fumu, jari no otoha sabishikatta) stimulates my memory of sounds. Another line, “Sunlight falls on the verandah” (Engawa ni higa atatete), evokes a visual experience of my childhood when I could see light and darkness, and recalls the tactile warmth of the verandah’s wood.
　I also chose images from Chuya’s poetry collection that I touch-read and felt, and created shapes based on sensations they call up inside me. These include “Time gone by” (Torisugita jikan), “Memories reborn as visual experiences” (Shi-keiken toshite yomigaettekuru kioku), and “The anxiety and sense of loss of existence” (Sonzai no fuan to soshitsukan).
　Working in this way, I found myself searching even farther back in my memory of sensations, and I decided to recreate my synesthetic experience of “colored braille” in the period when I completely lost my ability to see, around the age of 10. Although an iconic memory of something only I can actually imagine, I felt a desire to return again to the extremity of sensory perception by recreating that memory one time.
　In addition, there is a new work in which my own words are incorporated in colored braille, and a work created based on colors in my memory from when I could still see. Then, I also exhibit the work Preserving Memory of Walking Fast, expressing an image of my body as I walked around a sculpture touching it.

As for walking on a raised path between fields, I am likely to have trouble and get my white cane tangled in the grass. But if I can fall into the field that Imamura is cultivating, I will be lucky.

Colored braille and synesthesia:
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another sense. Typical examples include “sound-to-color synesthesia,” in which sound automatically evokes an experience of color, and “grapheme-color synesthesia,” in which colors unexpectedly appear when looking at letters.
In my case, I began to perceive colors in response to the shapes of braille letters when gradually losing my eyesight around the age of 10. For instance, the braille for the Japanese syllable あ (“a”) evoked the color of a naked light bulb, and that for the syllable い (“i”) evoked a dull grainy blue. Around 1997, when starting to draw pictures using line tape and decorative adhesive sheets, I wrote down the relationships between syllables and colors so that I wouldn't forget them. I named them “colored braille.”