Water gives Ichi Ikeda inspiration

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.