The young and energetic curator from Japan, Sayaka Ashidate, has pulled off a near perfect trifecta in her New York curatorial debut at the renowned Ise Cultural Foundation in SoHo. Selecting down from ten original artists, she chose three artists who incorporate “a flat surface form of expression that aspires to four dimensions” through the deployment of time, the fourth dimension. The works underscore the plasticity of that dimension through the example of non-linear editing in which events can be freely and randomly sequenced, jumbled, and reordered, whereas this distortion cannot exist in the real world.

Shingo Francis’s Bound for Eternity is a suspended C-shaped acrylic work on paper that appears to float at the end of the room, surrounding the viewer in an arc with an image first inspired by the sunrise that the artist observed so frequently from jet planes in his frequent commutes between Japan and the U.S. The expansive band of color exudes reddish volcanic or solar primal energy as its intensity fades on its peripheries into a gaseous feathering yellow-green. The sense imparted is of one of the galactic, the infinite, the sublime, invoking questions of the dynamism and limits of our universe, its expansion, its edges, and what lies beyond.

Kaeko Mizukoshi uses physical and metaphorical framing as a means of establishing timelines and intercalated histories in conjunction with generational and disrupted imagery. Her series of pictures, appropriated from tourist guidebooks of popular ancient sites in Greece, problematize the issues of documentation, for even photographic images and their copies, that are widely accepted as truthful and realistic reproductions, are subjective, edited and shaped by bias, education, and experience. The kanji that accompanies the sculpted figure of Dionysius remains an abstraction for those who do not read Japanese and paired together reflect disjointed time, with text as image as text, coexisting with separate readings and variant histories. Even a second glance of the same scene or a copy of a copy of a copy is a different, dated historicized version, evoking the phrase, “the future isn’t what it used to be.” The artist continues, “Yesterday’s futuristic visions are not the same as today’s futuristic visions; the differences are gaps.”  Disturbances of the space-time continuum as well as amplified errors resulting from generations of serial copying constitute gaps that the artist terms “the lost future in the past.”

Kazuki Umezawa, the youngest artist in the group, still seems like an oldster when he speaks of the next generation of Japanese youth whose brains must surely be wired differently from their computer and internet acumen from very young ages. The source material for his expansive flat wall installation, neo-X-death, remarkable for its vibrant pastiche of color and repetition, is the internet from which he grabs and prints out images. Asked why he prefers two-dimensional games in the era of realistic dimensional online worlds of war, he states that, characteristic of his generation in Japan, he chooses to operate in a more fantastic, versus a more realistic, environment for gameplaying. In contradistinction to the Superflat art movement that is largely derived from anime and manga, this work is entirely appropriated from the internet. Subsequently, the artist marks his broad collaged work by hand with ink, acrylic, glitter, and fluorescent paint.

This is a thoughtful selection of artists whose works address the central issue of reframing the plasticity of time in three different media, expressed as the measureless divine, historicity uncoupled, and the appropriated reconfigured.

Images: Shingo Francis, Bound for Eternity (magentablue), 2009. Gouache, acrylic on paper, 60 in x 59 ft.; Kaeko Mizukoshi, Images in the process of being documented, 2010. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable; Kazuki Umezawa, Next ➞ the conclusion, 2010. Acrylic, fluorescent paint, glitter on inkjet digital prints, 106 in x 26 ft. All photos by Tsukasa Yokozawa. Courtesy ISE Cultural Foundation.