Air Revisited: "Art of Air" and "Grinding Powder"

Currently, the Keio Museum Commons (KeMCo) is hosting the exhibition "Soichiro Mihara: Recipes for the Art of Air" (until August 3). Soichiro Mihara is an artist who reinterprets physical phenomena and natural systems—such as sound, bubbles, radiation, rainbows, microorganisms, moss, airflow, soil, water, and electrons—into art through open technology. He categorizes his works into the properties of air: "vibration, respiration, and particles," and refers to the collective whole as the "Art of Air." Furthermore, he has conceived the creation of "recipes" as a mechanism to indicate the artist's intent during his lifetime and to share the imagination related to the core of the work with others by documenting information such as work overviews, phenomena handled, functional diagrams, circuit diagrams, component lists and parts, and production procedures. In this exhibition, the first edition of these recipes is released, allowing visitors to experience the artist's thinking, which finds updates and cycles in the nature of the works, while presenting the "Art of Air" in a comprehensive form.

The new work, "Grinding Powder," belongs to the "particles" category. At the same time, it is an important tool for creating recipes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while living with masks, Mihara reaffirmed that "scent" consists of "particles" floating in the air, and since then, he has been advancing the pulverization of materials. He hacked existing tools that enable crushing according to the size and hardness of materials—such as ball mills, coffee mills, and stone mortars—to assemble his own automated device for grinding powder. In fact, the recipes are printed with DIY ink made from the powdered parts of the works they describe, literally representing the "color of the work." "Grinding Powder," which is a room-scale installation, consists of a thermo-hygrometer that visually indicates the state of the air, a small mill for scent performances along with materials before crushing, and the ink pigment and the self-made device that achieves its fine pulverization, exuding the presence of the artist's practice surrounding powder and air.

In addition to this, works are deployed throughout the 1st to 3rd floors of the building, taking advantage of its structure. The relationship between the works and the environment, and the visualization and sonification of the systems within, change from moment to moment and never remain the same. We hope you will take two or three laps around the museum and experience the various types of air at KeMCo this summer.

(Shiho Hasegawa, Staff Member, Keio Museum Commons)