Harajuku rarely gives your eyes a moment off. Seeen Harajuku offers something closer to a reset. Designed by Kohei Nawa and his creative studio Sandwich, the building’s dark, rippling exterior gives way to a cavernous interior, where the sculptor’s exhibition ‘At Random’ unfolds across four floors and a spiral staircase.
Inside, familiar things become difficult to place. A television, a boombox and taxidermied animals appear beneath countless transparent spheres in Nawa’s PixCell works, their surfaces magnified and distorted into something almost otherworldly. Upstairs, the new PixCell-Memorandum series fragments photographs of cities into images that emerge and disappear as you move. A painting from his grandmother’s house becomes another kind of preserved memory, incorporated directly into a sculpture.
Elsewhere, black, velvet-covered Spark sculptures seem to suspend an explosion in midair, while bubbles continually form and burst in the silicone oil of Biomatrix. Marihiko Hara’s soundscape carries piano, bells, stones and seashells through the stairwell, giving the architecture its own shifting atmosphere.
Moving between objects that seem arrested in time and surfaces that refuse to stay still, the exhibition considers how much of what we see belongs to the thing itself – and how much we bring along with us.
