ARTWORKS
Eri Yagi

Island of Collage
Year Created: 2020
Materials: Watson paper, pencil, transparent watercolor
Room: 205 and others
(Photos 1-3)

Octopus Altar
Year: 2021
Materials: Watercolor on Echizen washi paper, pencil
Size: 945mm × 570mm
Location: 2F Public Area
(Photo 4)

The work consists of approximately three hundred drawings related to Okinawa. The term “collage” in the title refers not simply to the physical act of pasting images together, but to the encounter of heterogeneous elements—and to the deviations, frictions, and generative meanings that arise from such encounters. If a collage is created through meeting something foreign, then tourism itself can be seen as a kind of collage. With this in mind, I wanted to create a work that would allow visitors to “sightsee” even from within the hotel room.

Each pair of drawings is arranged so that the two images seem related but not quite, or unrelated but perhaps somehow connected. The framed drawings capture fleeting images that crossed my mind, compressed into a single plane in the form of collage. These drawings, when viewed together, form an even larger collage. The complexity that emerges from combining diverse elements appears to me to symbolize the culture of Okinawa, located at the crossroads of the Asian region.

Octopus Altar is one of three diagrammatic works created as the culmination of the series Island of Collage.

The drawings are made with pencil and watercolor on Echizen washi paper.

Following an imagined narrative—“an octopus proudly arranging its treasures on an altar”—I depicted motifs related to the sea of Okinawa. Due to its many arms, the octopus has often been portrayed as a symbol of greed (see: Roger Caillois, The Octopus: A Logic of the Imaginary, translated by Mikio Tsukasaki, Seidosha, 2019). Inspired by this historical interpretation, the work projects my own personal memories of the Okinawan sea onto the figure of the octopus.