HIKARI
2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Aki Kondo
Hikari (Light) (2015) depicts a fantastical and wrenching story about Juneko, a terminally ill young woman who communicates with her lover, a painter, through a portrait of her produced shortly after her death. As Juneko becomes sicker, her hair begins to fall out, a symptom of her unnamed illness. As her condition deteriorates, the film toggles back and forth with the animated story of Mogeji, a white strand of hair inhabiting Juneko’s body who becomes anthropomorphized through Kondo’s animation and recounts his own story of mortality and loss. Although its love story is unabashedly sentimental, Hikari (Light) also responds to the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan and the national trauma it subsequently triggered. Reframed in this context, Juneko’s illness draws more unsettling allusions to the radiation poisoning experience by citizens living near nuclear reactors damaged during the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Throughout, the animated interludes function as their own counter narrative depicting that, despite its elements of the fantastic, metaphorically depicts a body in crisis. Hauntingly complex, Hiraki (Light) offers a powerful meditation on loss, disease, and the inexorable necessity for hope amidst trauma.
Aki Kondo utilizes animation, video, and mixed media to explore such varied topics as intimacy, loss, and the human body. Her work crosses multiple practices and frequently investigates the creative process as an object of study in and of itself, exploring how artistic mediums can communicate emotionally complicated narrative through expressive and resonant images. Her animation work is especially unconventional, and while her characters often appear fantastical, they invariably tell far more serious stories than their cartoonish form would suggest.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Trevor Yeung
2014“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals...
© » KADIST
Som Supaparinya
2012The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams...
© » KADIST
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
2018Anointed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Dan Lin is a poem recital/video that addresses the American nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 to 1958 in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls...
© » KADIST
Rossella Biscotti
In a broader sense, the meaning of ‘blackout’ —primarily an electrical failure or momentary interruption, opens up to new organizations, perceptions and different ways of experiencing time and space...
© » ARTSJOURNAL
Protester charged for defacing African American Civil War memorial at US National Gallery of Art Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Museums & Heritage news Protester charged for defacing African American Civil War memorial at US National Gallery of Art A climate activist with the group Declare Emergency has been taken into custody over a paint-smearing incident at the museum last year Torey Akers 9 February 2024 Share Declare Emergency affiliate Jackson Green during a protest at the National Gallery of Art on 14 November 2023 Courtesy Declare Emergency Jackson Green, an activist from Utah, has been arrested and charged with defacing a memorial to Black Civil War soldier at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC last autumn...
© » KADIST
Andrew Norman Wilson
2020Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments...
