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| Artist's Statement |
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Fumino Hora was born and educated in Tokyo, Japan.
She moved to Hong Kong in 1994, and started her art career in Hong Kong. She is an established artist of landscape, portraits and floral paintings. Her works have been collected locally and internationally, and a part of the profit that has been raised by her artworks has been donated to several charity institutes, such as UNISEF. She has held several exhibitions of her work in the past few years and attended numerous group exhibitions. Her latest solo exhibition “Evolution II” was held at the Fringe Club in Central, in May, and it earned a lot of positive responses.
“Human Image”—and especially “the Image of Women” has been the core of her work, although it is very hard to deliver the entire image of this theme.
She has tried to express women’s strength, flexibility, vulnerability, sensitivity and spirituality through the culture, history and religion.
She is currently working on “The Image of Asian Women” and this project has traveled around a number of countries in Asia, including Bali, Vietnam, Sri-Lanka and Japan.
She specializes in paintings, however, she challenges the form. She works in both organic and inorganic forms, and in two-dimensional and in three-dimensional forms, or sometimes even in four-dimensional forms, depending on the subject and concept that she is working on.
She also explores various materials. She enjoys working with fabrics, metals, and wood, or the combination of some. For her, their strength and flexibility can express the nature of women.
She finished the Bachelor of Fine Art Degree course with the Royal Melbourne Institute and Technology University in December 2002, in which she experimented with various media and is seeking a more conceptual form of expression. Her latest work “Hina” has been awarded the second runner-up prize in the Philippe Charriol Foundation 17th Art Competition in September 2002
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| Articles |
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Forms of Resistance
by Pamela Kember
In her most recent sculptural works that deliberately resemble traditional Japanese robes of a bygone era, Fumino Hora's installation consists of two elements hina and femininity. "Hina" is a Japanese word for dolls, or "chicks" an endearing term that a parent, or relative would use to talk about a daughter in the family. You can find hina dolls in most Japanese homes during "girls day' celebrations every March 3rd. In this exhibition, simply entitled Hina, Fumino Hora explores the intimate connection between spirit and body, as well as costume and identity as a starting point for an intensive examination of the conditions and rules and of forced behaviour of women in Japanese culture and society. Combining contempoary ideas with historical transitions has become a popular means of presenting art from Asia in recent years, and there is always the emphasis on a synthesis of tradition and modernity, loss of history, memory, or culture. There is also an increased interest in the body as the carrier of meaning, regardless of gender differences.
Fumino's work underlies an emotional connection to the objects she creates, whether they are made from wood, brass, fibre, metal or textiles; all playing a decisive role in communicating the conceptual nature of her more recent work. She has stated that "there are new winds, a new air of change at work" and, "that the concept is everything." Something that has moved her through and away from her earlier flower and landscape paintings.
But it is "the absent body" that becomes the interface between the sensual and the spiritual, between material and concept in this latest series of works. Made of up a set of 15 figurines based on an Imperial Court complete with Emperor and Empress, courtiers and musicians they are usually brought out and presented on a tiered stage set, complete with tiny objects that represent the Imperial household, usually set against a red coloured backing material.
Fumino also surprises us. For if you examine the work closely, the voluminous folds of what appears to be silk, are all made from malleable brass mesh, with perilously sharp edges.
These high-stylised 'costumes' create diaphanous folds, that are embedded with photo transfers from her family album - grandparents, aunts, uncles, all of who have passed away. The highly decorative forms of the Hina series are unmistakably linked to Japanese stylised costumes and Fumino's medium of choice appears to be fabric; but in fact might be called "fibre art " pieces.
Similarly, over the past three decades there has been a considerable re-examination of the role of textiles, and craft within the visual arts. With increasing numbers of critical practices by feminist artists and theorists who denounced the conventional associations with handicraft, textiles and so called "women's work". Here, materials and their materiality are important to the process, as Fumino is drawn to the flexibility and hardness of rolls of brilliantly shiny golden brass mesh, of various gradations that are also extremely sharp and dangerous to handle, without protective gloves. The cutting and folding processes, exerts a lot of physical energy, before unfolding to be reformed into extraordinarily voluptuous masses, she then pulls individual threads from the mesh to tack onto the borders, creating a formal web-like intricacy of fretwork shapes to fix the costume in place.
"I often employ "sewing", "stitching", and "embroidery" in my work, because these activities will represent "women's endless tasks and chores". In this "Hina" series I also used a lot of sewing and stitching. I used the metal as if it was fabric, cutting it, crumbling it, folding it, gathering it, and making pleats of it. I pick up a piece of fibre of metal as if it were thread and sew it as if I was really making clothes out of fabric."
In the tradition of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, Fumino Hora also plays with the tension between materials and forms. The meshed surface of the brass allows the photo transfers that are glued onto, and folded between the material to appear as shadowy, grainy images of a re-instated past.
Born and raised in Meguro, close to Roppongi and the centre of Tokyo, she initially trained as a concert pianist, when she graduated and moved to Kobe (near Kyoto) for two years before returning to Meguro. Fumino came out to Hong Kong in January 1994, and it was her first time abroad apart from a few short stays in Britain studying at a university.
Fumino uses the theme of hina as a multiple situation for the role of women in Japanese society: expectations of daughters towards marriage, fear of loosing identity, struggling with culture and boundaries, issues of filial piety, and beauty, are all present in hina. The artist is developing a re-interpretation of allusions to traditions, at the same time she attempts to assert the body's presence even when physically absent. By subverting stereotypically hard and soft materials so that they take on a new dynamic.
The artist's work is quietly charged with social sensibilities and the soft, fluid visual aspect of the work, is a quiet deception, a rouse, in order to explore issues of gender and critic notions of fabric, and "the feminine". There is an impression of a soft, floating, resilient constraint, that is then protected with a hardened shell made from brass. These hybrid forms, that to all intense and purpose appear transitional, are in fact a transmutation that embraces modernism, and advances in technology.
It seems that this intriguing series of larger than life size sculptures that allude to the body evokes a profound interest in the relationship between ideas and the reality of certain human constraints and conditions. At the same time it is important to recognise that Fumino is concerned at the disappearance of beautiful things or individuals. For example she refers to the influence of the work of Christian Boltanski, Mary Kelly and in particular, Hesse's Contingents paintings- a group of hanging textiles that resemble paintings. For each of these artists, issues of absence and presence; clothes as conduits for reconstituting memories and events, and the use of photographs of individuals as a way to explore the idea of trace, and loss, echo the sentiments of Fumino's Hina. But hers in not an attempt at nostalgia for the past- it is a transitional space that has developed out of a sense of connectedness to some other place.
In Laura Doyles collection of essays, Bodies of Resistance, she poses the question “If as bodied social creatures we walk always within the contours of a culture, shaped by its codes and disciplines, how do we realise in the flesh any gesture of resistance? If prohibitions insinuate themselves into our most intimate and palpable forms of being, the sensations of our hands, the sights of our eyes, out of what materials, by what moves, might we (do we) generate another social ontology and write an alternative code?
Fumino may often form a resistance to such patriarchal values, but her works cannot clearly be described as feminist at all. She brings contemporary and historical references together, and yet remains close to her Japanese spiritual and cultural roots. Her exposure and studies with Western consciousness, and, in particular conceptual artists has led to a greater awareness, if not direct engagement with political feminist ideologies. Fumino sees feminism as too complicated issues that she would need to study, and engage in more before it can be applied to her work.
But there is an aspect of confronting particular existing power networks of Japanese culture and society, and the role of women, As she suggests:
"I do not think I want to contribute to the reinstallation of the old traditions. My attitude toward them is neutral. If they disappear as time goes by let it go. If these changes release women from the boundaries around them, it should be welcomed. But in order to do that, we have to lose so many beautiful things.'
The artist states that there are conflicts and contradictions "Hina" as a term is used to criticise Japanese culture... to objectify the position of women in Japan. Throughout the history, how inferior they have been, how anonymous they have been, and how forced they have been to have the "ideal happiness" based on the culture and the tradition, and how many boundaries they have to carry in order to keep the perfection."
The basis of her investigation, rooted in Japanese tradition and ritual, confronts the central question of what is happiness and at what cost of personal freedom? "I have tried to celebrate women's strength, vulnerability, flexibility, sensitivity, sensuality and spirituality, etc… through my work. However, during the process of working on the "Hina project", I realised the significance that the traditions have. So many beautiful things in the culture are much to do with the traditions. This feeling gradually became some kind of sentimentalism or nostalgia. And I would not have had this kind of feeling if I was living in Japan."
Fumino appears to link her concern over the social position of Japanese women in a rule-bound society that's enamoured of rituals, with aspects of happiness, and home life. Here in Fumino's work, the dolls are absent from the finished garment, which appear like shells, or objects suspended on a board, more as displays of artefacts in a museum. But what is immediately striking, is their sumptuousness, the multiple, sumptuous folds of material, along with their larger than life scale.
Fumino may try hard not to be too interested in the aesthetic element, yet the work tends towards beautification- despite her attempts at the opposite. She is also interested to convey how inanimate objects signify human values; emotional attachments- happiness, desire, the softness, and sensualness of material, yet creating a direct tension between form and content. More specifically is that gender and sexuality are inescapable considerations in the face of textiles, thread, and the material process at work. The robes are also extremely heavy, weighing much more than they appear to. As Fumino hints at in her use of this particular tradition, "Hina is a tribute to womanhood, yet also a sense of mourning, and in some respects a protest of sorts. She also suggests " If I borrow the concept of Yoko Ono, the role of art to me is being messages'. ...messages to connect the artist and the viewers. I hope my work can convey my messages."
As a body of work that moves in-between the feminine and masculine, craft and art, handmade and the mass-produced, Fumino Hora's Hina challenges our expectations of gender and artistic production by creating an intimate conceptual experience that is simultaneously richly present and resolutely indefinable.
Pamela Kember
August 2003.
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| Reviews |
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(1) 24/7, South China Morning Post, May 10th 2001,“Flying to the Artistic Heights”
(2) Today’s Living, December, 2001
(3) BC Magazine, April 18, 2002
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