Jun’ichiro Ishii

Jun’ichiro Ishii is a Japanese artist who changed his artistic approach through his socio-cultural experiences. Born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1975 he established himself as an interior designer. But with the process of discovering the arts with more varieties and complexities he general interests turned to much more complex creative activities. His self-culture awareness and his artistic soul took him to South Korea where he discovered different culture. After two years of artistic experience in Seoul, since 2006 he moves to Paris.

Ishii made a short visit of Bangladesh and he attended a seminar in our ALAP. There he showed his artistic approaches, his inspirations and three of his experimental works. He had expressed his extreme interest in observing local, cultural peculiarities. He showed his curious approaches towards these peculiarities and expressed them with symbolic form of arts. He didn’t show any formed methods. Based on the site-specific point of view we saw his great interest in local, cultural peculiarities. First of all he showed us his inspiring arts, and then he showed his experimental works. He tried to do something different, may be they were not much of use but they were the art that he wanted to do. Some special works were shown to us. First he made an a wooden platform shaping 8. He made it in two shapes. One was overlapping in the middle, and the other crossed. But these both installation work expressed infinity. His installation work had a uniqueness which described his views. Through his videos he expressed a quite different view of his work which was quite interesting and also at the same time managing us to realize his view of infinity. Through his hard work, his sustainable walking just gave us a clear vision of his thoughts. 3 steps in 3 hours with the clouds at the backgrounds moving with the same vision, journey to the infinity. I really enjoyed his videos and was amazed of his 12800%work style. He has his own vision, his style of expressing his works and also uninstalling his works. He was very conscious about his works, was very passionate too.

In his second video we saw his cultural inquisitiveness with Chai. He found a lot of peculiarities in Turkey. He found very interesting in the 8 Gods for birth in seven days. He also tried to figure out the reasons, history of their culture. After his unique first wooden platform, we again saw his symbolic form of art work which was nothing but chai. A cup of tea which is commonly seen in Turkey was expressional to the peace of the Turkeys. He hung 72 cups full of tea and expressed peace in realism with the reflection of lights on them. He also made a photographic exhibition there regarding this. It was quite tiring and also very careful work to place these works. About this peaceful realism, he found rickshaw and buses in our country in that symbolic form.
His last video was silkworm, he saw a car which was wasted and then after observing that he took the car to wrap it silk threads. His intension was to make it a part of the nature. Ishii is a very passionate man. We can’t say that his work is the combination of hardwork and his ideas, rather something expressional which reflects his satisfactions and many more things too. His ever smiling face, his presentations tell how worth his works are to him. A man like him always inspire us to be passionate, hardworking and above all must be satisfied with our works. He showed us if someone has a passion to create something, he can make it possible at any cost.