NEORT++ is pleased to announce the solo exhibition "Screen Flesh" by Takayoshi Ohara.

Statement

In recent years, image media have increased their transparency as a medium through improvements in resolution and frame rate. At the same time, the spread of portable devices and the normalization of tactile interfaces have foregrounded the screen, allowing images to be experienced as an interface that carries the possibility of being touched.

These two tendencies resonate with the modes of vision that the art historian Alois Riegl distinguished as the “optical” (optisch) and the “haptic” (haptisch). Whereas the former seeks to grasp objects within depth while maintaining distance, the latter compresses distance and approaches the surface. In today’s media environment, however, the two do not switch exclusively between one another. Rather, perspectival depth and interfacial shallowness appear to be simultaneously emphasized and overlapping within a single experience.

Under these conditions, images are increasingly transforming into events that exceed the framework of subject and object and incorporate bodily presence and movement. In considering this transformation, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is suggestive. The body is not an apparatus that receives the world, but a “lived body” in which meaning is generated within relations.

In this exhibition, a situation is created in which the display itself moves. Within this situation, viewers engage with it by following it with their eyes, adjusting their focus, and moving around it. In a field where depth and shallowness intersect, images appear as relations arising between body and world, gently unsettling the contours of seeing.

Grant：The Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences