Statement

“Dual Window”

I used to spend such a long time gazing out from inside my house. The windows are frames for the world to me.

As I gaze out through the window, I remember my life in a far-off country. The distant roads of my memory overlap with the landscape before my eyes.

I choose to recreate this overlapped memory on the face of a window. I will furnish the window’s frame with multiple views from where I’ve been residing.

The dual window will not only connect the interior to the exterior. And it will not only be a window atop your desk that connects you with someone somewhere else on Earth. It is a piece of art that exists in our day to day life, it calls forth a dual identity that is neither and nowhere.

The drawn-on landscapes will fade and disappear. By then, the dual landscape will become one –together with the reality beyond the glass.

Project Overview

Dual Window takes the landscapes and decorations of two countries and mingles them into a piece.

I paint the landscape seen from two distant countries on window glass, overlapping them. The different frame designs of both cultures act as motifs, and come together around the window to create an entirely new frame. Combining the landscapes of the glass and the designs of the frames, the work surpasses the geological location and the culture to create one overlapping dual window.

If windows connect us to the outside world, dual window encourages us to imagine the world that remains unseen.
DUAL WINDOW will be created together with the owner of the house, and completed by installing it into the home or building. It is intended to be used as a "window" in houses or facilities. In contrast to works that are exhibited and publicized to an unspecified number of people, DUAL WINDOW is a work for a limited number of people who look at the "window" in their daily space.

The idea for DUAL WINDOW was planned before the novel coronavirus became a global issue. Nonetheless, it is as if it was made in response to the pandemic. When it became difficult to move to the outside world, the window was a precious link between us, who were inside, and the outside world. Even though we are still connected to the rest of the world through the "window" of our PC, the unreachable world beyond the window seems to look more appealing than what we experience inside. From inside of my window, I watched the birds and insects flying freely outside, and admired them anew.

Personally, I am more interested in the inherent possibilities of this physical form of "window" than in the futuristic windows we often seen from Internet. At the same time, I also notice the inherent frailty in exhibitions which often becomes the primary activity in modern art. I believe that art is not based on the premise of an exhibition but is very close to our daily life. By creating something close to our daily life, it will also connect us to other places and other people from different background. This pandemic situation is what motivates me further to make DUAL WINDOW comes to its actual form.

The motifs for the landscapes and the frames in this work are respectively from Japan and Indonesia. Japan is where I was born, and Indonesia is my current home. Dual Window represents the fusion of Japanese and Indonesian culture within me. The dual landscape in this window is the imagined landscape of my life between the two countries, and is a part of the image of the society that I am actually trying to establish.

2020.12.02
Jun KITAZAWA