Ashes and Snow, Odaiba

I picked up my round-the-world ticket today. I’m really going! Yikes! It was a good five-hundred euro more expensive in the end. I guess I had a miscommunication over the phone with the clerk about the total amount of tax: The perils of buying in a foreign language. But it’s still wicked good value and I’m so happy to be able to check that all the complicated transfers are correct.
I had to pick the ticket up in the airline’s head office in Shinbashi in the centre of Tokyo. I wanted to make something of the trip so I skipped over the bay on the monorail to Odaiba. I went to a wonderful exhibition. In fact, to call it an exhibition is to do it an injustice. It was an experience, an audio-visual journey. It was called ‘ashes and snow’ and consisted of a display of images, movie and music in cavernous space called the nomadic museum.
The works are by a Canadian-born artist and documentary filmmaker, Gregory Colbert. He has travelled widely and photographed subjects in India, Egypt, Myanmar, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and other such places.
A key point of the project is that none of the images have been digitally collaged or superimposed. All works represent what the artist actually saw through his camera lens. It can be hard to believe when you see a kneeling boy reading in front of a kneeling elephant or an African girl resting her head against a leopard’s proud shoulder.
The gallery itself is fascinating. It’s been designed by the Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban. It’s a transitory space constructed of rented steel cargo containers stacked on top of each other. The interior is formed with pillar-like paper tubing. The space has the feeling of a cathedral, with a dark and vaulted ceiling and the huge prints hanging around the walls like the Stations of the Cross.
It’s ‘nomadic’ because it can be dismantled and reassembled at any new destination. Tokyo is the third stop on the project’s journey, having already been shown in New York and California.
I was glad I went to the museum on a blustery, rainy day. The building felt like it was alive with creaking and rustling. It gave an even greater sense of the human-made and the natural intermingling.
There were many arresting images. I’ll try to upload a few of the more famous ones from the catalog. But a lot of my favourite pictures didn’t make it into the handout: The ape and human hands in a clasp echoing Adam and his Creator on the Sistine chapel ceiling. The young Buddhist trainee monk pictured with an eagle flying behind him. His serene figure became adorned with angel’s wings. The enlarged close-up of an elephant’s eye - it held such wrinkled beauty, such aged wisdom. It seemed to say, ‘You humans think you know what it’s all about, but you have no clue. I’ve been around long before you and I’ll still be here long after you’re gone.’
But for me this project was all about the video presentation. The choreography of human and animal, the classical and ethnic score, the sepia tone all worked in harmony.
Regardless of any artistic merit, the videos were stunning technically. The artist captured images underwater, in the jungle, in the desert. Hardly studio conditions! He got wild and often dangerous animals to interact with humans in incredibly close proximity. He made videos that were exhilarating, sensual and completely compelling. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the beautiful images. I can’t do them justice in words. I mean how can I explain that a man and woman literally danced under water? And not tacky synchronized swimming, but real artistic, choreographed movement. It showed the sheer beauty of their human form.
Colbert left all the works untitled and without explanation. We are each to go on our own journey, just as the exhibition does.
I believe the artist wanted to show that, though clearly not the same, animals and humans are both masterpieces of nature. We’re sharing the one planet, the one spirit. We’re on the one journey.
He chose either to put humans in an incongruous animal environment or animals out of place in a human space. In doing so, the resulting interaction highlights what binds us together and what can tear us apart.
He used some recurring themes - a trip, often represented by a boat, a river or movement like water, a secret being whispered, a book, fire. I think these were designed to show where we differ from the animal world with our intellect and expression. Then there were repeated views of people with the eyes closed - maybe underlining how we get so wrapped up in being ‘human’ we can miss out on the animal in us. And throughout it all we had the beauty of human movement and dance mirroring or complementing animal movement.
I felt he was saying we, as human, have made great advances. Yet we mustn’t ignore the fact that we share the planet with other spirits, and that the world is a more beautiful and whole place when we try to dance to the same rhythm.
I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it all. Please go and see it if it comes to a city near you and tell me what you think.