Water gives Ichi Ikeda inspiration

Asip A. Hasani, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

Water is the most valuable natural resource on earth needed by humans in their daily lives. A scarcity of clean water would cause great suffering, but only a few people in this country have any concern for water conservation.

Japanese contemporary artist Ichi Ikeda, however is very serious about the issue. He consistently uses and explores water to create art that is strongly connected to global environmental problems, particularly water conservation.

Ikeda's work Through Arcing Ark to Asian Water/Art Channel, which is being displayed at the Cemeti Art House from May 10 to May 30, reflects his deep concern about water.

Three bamboo boats hung from the gallery's ceiling are the center of his unique piece. Each end of the three boats is connected to each other using transparent tubes through which water can flow from one boat to another.

The three boats' chain -- beginning from a higher boat hung in the corner of the room and ending in the mouth of the well of the gallery -- symbolizes the water cycle. In Ikeda's imagination, the three boats float in three rivers in Yogyakarta, the Progo, the Code and the Winongo.

"We need water just like the boats need the rivers," Ikeda says. "Whether the rivers here will be polluted or not in the future depends on all of us."

Ikeda's ideas about water are a common theme in his art. However, his long-time dedication to water conservation efforts as well as his consistence in creating art can raise consciousness of the masses on the importance of clean water.

Attached on the wall of the exhibition room are photographs of what he calls water senders, pictures of dozens of people taking water with the palms of their hands, people's faces washed with water and people's feet washed with water.

"Be water senders, sending water to all people living in the future regardless of cultural, national or religious differences and disagreements," Ikeda exhorts.

The exhibition is, in fact, a continuation (extension) of his earlier work entitled Arcing Ark, which was created between 1997 and 1999 in some Asian countries which included indoor and outdoor exhibitions.

Feeling guilty for being a part of the first group of students to join research in high polymer chemistry in early 1960s -- when he was student at Japan's Kyoto University where he obtained a bachelor's degree -- the 58-year-old Ikeda became a "green" activist.

"The high polymer industry produces such materials as styrofoam and nylon that pollute the environment," he said.

Ikeda has been involved in art since the mid 1960s becoming a playwright and an art director with a theater group. Years before his Arcing Ark project, he had been keenly interested in water as the subject of his art.

His artwork and thoughts are like a science-fiction story. The engineer-cum-artist becomes "water admirer" not only because of water's real meaning to people's daily life but also because of its unpredictability or its uncontrollable state.

"We can create a sculpture from solid material but we can't create it using water," he simply says.

He believes that water is the basic unit of Eastern civilization as opposed to the Western base of land.

He compares all of Western civilization to "Stonehenge", a structure of stones arranged systematically and symmetrically. Wherein the absence one stone in the structure would cause the collapse of the whole structure.

"Waterhenge" is the term he uses to describe Eastern civilization which does not have a systematic structure, yet, it he claims the power of water cannot really be controlled by others or outsiders.

"And since the Industrial Revolution, culture in the modern age land-based civilization (The Occidental world) seems to have overwhelmed the water-based civilization (Asia). However, the 21st century will be the 'Water Era'in which the East will ask for a restoration of the water-based civilization which originates from Southeast Asia and spreads to form a water front all over Asia," he said.

He said that establishing an art network in Asia can be a beginning to extending the water-based network wider aimed at saving the future with regard to the adequacy of clean water.