Juri Akiyama: Isle Afloat in Current

Juri Akiyama creates works that traverse painting and sculpture, using beeswax as her primary material while engaging with its historical, cultural, and philosophical background. For the festival, she takes on an exhibition that responds to a site’s history through the billboard architecture of Kakuchi Konpo, notable for its striking mortar decoration.

After the Great Kanto Earthquake, artist Tomoyoshi Murayama discovered a space for avant-garde ornamentation in the makeshift shacks that emerged in Tokyo. During the reconstruction period, wooden buildings appeared with their facades covered in non-combustible materials like copper plates, mortar, and tiles, featuring a variety of decoration. Years later, architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori named these buildings “billboard architecture.” These appear to have inherited the generous ornamentation and modest quality of the shacks.

After that, Tokyo was reduced to a wasteland again by war, and following soaring land prices, buildings have now come to be regarded as mere “superstructures” atop the land. Meanwhile, looking within the realm of buildings, art in Japanese architectural history evolved from temporary forms like folding screens and sliding door paintings to securing its own domain through the creation of the tokonoma alcove.

“Temporary, Permanent, Foundation.” For this exhibition, Akiyama expresses this fluid or creative relationship using beeswax, a material long symbolic of superficiality and impermanence. The venue is both a precious surviving example of billboard architecture and a space that once embodied the ambiguous boundary of “preparing to depart” or “being here yet already gone,” associated with the packaging industry.

Cooperation: Kakuchi Konpo

* Juri Akiyama is one of the participating artists in the Billboard Architecture Project.