Yuichi Higashionna

Untitled (chandelier)
fluorescent lamps, aluminium frames, wiring cords, banding band, electronic ballast

125x110x99(h)

2005


Yuichi Higashionna

Yuichi Higashionna lives and works in Tokyo. He started to create works that led to his current work style around 1994.
He is an artist whose works of paintings, objects and installations are inspired by unexplainable odd and canny feelings emerged from something strikes him in his everyday life.

He creates installations of intertwining light sculptures, shadowy stencilled paintings, and striped and moiré pattering.

Inspired by interior decorating of Japanese homes in the 1970's during a period of economic prosperity, the artist explores the aesthetic of fanshii. Reffering to that which is kitsch or odd, almost to the point of tackiness, fanshii ultimately reflected Japanese compulsive admiration for Western. He noticed the fact that the fluorescent lamp in the circular-bulb style has independently spread in its use at Japanese home in general. His works are both an homage and a satire, to the Japanese "fluorescent culture" that fascinates him and at the same time makes him uncomfortable;

he wants the pieces to be familiar yet foreign, based on the Freudian concept of the "uncanny".

(The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.[1] (See Uncanny valley)

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.)