The wide view is phenomenal. Hills, rivers and valleys – in generous strokes a landscape opens up. Wide the spotted ash brown plain are only interrupted by scattered pile of what kind can’t be recognized from far. The whole could be a landscape of terminal moraines, polished down by glaciers, which moved over it a long time ago, or it could be a delta where the water is missing. Since all that takes place on the floor of a gallery these comparisons sound vain – but everybody who has seen Keiko Sato’s exhibition in “Raum Aktueller Kunst” in Vienna would agree with such images. To tell the fact: the walls are empty and the floor and two windowsills are covered with buckets of tag ends and short piece of branches. That’s all. The visitor enters into the room and stand still. There is no space available for him. The feet have to feel their way into the room like wondering along puddles of melted water. Every stick and tag end seems to have found its special space. The ends of the sticks are peeled immaculately from their skin and ordered like magnetic needles.
They accumulate to mountains or made to stand like little man.
The question, if these things are all rubbish or not does not appear. The only question is how one can move without destroying it all. Those banal materials immediately create painterly hues (ochre filter with burnt white edges, ashes with their well-known dark-grey, faintly glittering tones, red brown barks covering light wood and the air is filled with metallic stale smell of previous evening parties) and at the same there is autonomous world.
However, it’s a complicated thing, to be in a beautiful painting, but at the time described landscape evokes fantasies of violence. The disgusting leftovers from the ashtrays are mutating into burned soil and miniaturized battlefields.
The aesthetic observer is at the same time the destroyer and the general, who investigates for his hordes of tin soldiers – like a navigator who is leading in plane on emitted beams from one segment of a map to another being fully distanced to the consequences of his acts, so that burning towns appear as phenomena’s of extreme and large scale beauty, as participants of air attack later admitted.

To say from where the installation draws these double binds is difficult. Probably the tense fluctuations between contradictive perspectives are founded in the culture tradition from Keiko Sato comes from, or many professions she learnt. Keiko Sato was born in 1957 in Japan and had been working from 1979 for ten years as a midwife and nurse. In 1989 she moved to London and studied Fine Arts at Gold Smith’s College and from 1993-1995 at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. The exhibition in Vienna is her first show on her own. Another floor installation was already shown in 1995 in the exhibition in themuseum Oude Bonnefanten in Maastricht. There, the associations of the preciseness of Japanese Stone garden were not that obvious as they were in Vienna. But there also the visitors were confronted with a sensitive field which reminded to Japanese ceremonies. Some cylinder of glass fell, broke and splashed their contents onto the floor. Splinters of glass and puddles, waxes and clay, fragilely standing cylinder and the evaporating tea: also in Maastricht one was in touch with such conflicting materials like in Vienna. Both times the work was not planned to be destroyed by the visitors but obviously by entering the space one had necessarily to destroy or change the installation. While in Vienna the whole tectonic stricture could be moved by a tow, in Maastricht the splinters creaked and the puddles changed their shape with everyday. And both exhibitions the installations drew its creative power from that very fact. The observer could realize directly how a mixture of symbolic and real experience brings about the “sudden ignition of a poetic moment”.
Keiko Sato shows the relations of calm reserve and sudden violence not only with the materials of the arte povera but also makes those ambivalent moments being realized in space. To paraphrase it: Into the nose of the aesthetic navigators ascends smoke.

Broken glass, liquids, sand, and cigarette butts are some of the materials Keiko Sato allow occupying and traversing the open space of her installations. Chaos and control flow into each other so that even the most abject remains of human civilization become intriguing in their reborn beauty. Sato seduces the viewer into losing oneself in the spaces she processes, making the most contradictory levels of experience possible.
The installations are generally highly tangible, yet their strengths lie in the metaphorical, simultaneous narratives of the various elements: growth and decay, efflorescence and destruction, life and death. The main focus here is the human body or, more accurately, the body and spirit. Sometimes this is worked out in a psychological sense, as in her installations using brain scan, which on paper or combined with glass are fixed to a wall, or lie as burnt ash on the floor, between pieces of glass which have been joined together with telephone wire (1997). Other installations refers more symbolically to the human body, or even through the use of liquids or cigarette butts is as residues of human activities.
In her work, Sato endeavors to research the relationships between three entities, which - certainly in Western Cartesian thought are irreversibly divided. In a rationalist framework then, subject and object, person and surrounding, order and disorder, life and death have no other relationship to each other than that of contradiction, where one pole controls and dominates the others. In this framework, individual consciousness is always the measure of things. Not bad as a survival mechanism, but the opposite is always distance, alienation and a loss of meaningful experience. Experiences still occur for us in modern Western culture, but only as superficial tests of endurance not as a sanctioned activity from which we (may) drive deep meaning. Experience for us no longer belongs to the symbolic domain that defines and demarcates our reality.
Yet there are still experiences, many of them traumas, that (temporarily) breech this bastion. Experiences undergone in the harsh reality of life, shocking or frightening experiences shake your awake for a moment when you realize that the world around you isn't something that can be taken for granted. As an immigrant originally from Japan, Sato knows how it feels to be dislocated, pulled away from the values and customs of a familiar culture, away from the safety of existing social structure such as family, friends, work, political conviction and ideals. She knows how it feels to have to mentally and physically adapt to society with a different belief system, a different etiquette, other eating habits. It may not be traumatic to adjust to other habits or another language, but the fact that the relationship with the culture left behind can no longer taken be granted, certainly is. What is shocking to realize is that a culture or an identity is not a natural, static given. We are condemned to constantly new identities, often opposition to stereotypes and unequivocal icons. For Sato, being a stranger in her new world has perhaps become a permanent attitude. It forms the basis for another way to observing, of looking at a reality she can no longer assume to share with everyone else, but which leads her and her work to new insight.
Drawing on her own history, Sato makes works that are physically present, but which at the same time describe reality on different levels. Hence, an installation comprising cigarettebutts and ash can represent the total annihilation of earth, while also symbolizing an ode to life. The stinking human remains of our own neurotic and deviant behabiour digging our graves symbolize not only death and destruction, but also their opposites. Equally present are the multiple meanings of the desire for death and destruction. According to certain thought of traditions, only in this matter can unity, and therefore new life, be recovered.
Sato's installations instantly provoke resistance and repulsion, but these sentiments cannot conquer a profound aesthetic attraction leading to a new quest for meaning. She ultimately succeeds in linking (culturally) different systems and methods, and using them alongside one another without having to reduce one to the stereotypical opposite of the other. The results are scenes in which concrete experiences can lead to a wide range of metaphors and meanings, without requiring prejudicial contrasts.
www.inegevers.net

Fortunately two installations by Keiko Sato allowed some space for the viewers to make meaning. At spacex a tense web of builder’s scrim was fixed with large dabs of plaster to the floor, walls, and ceilings making a hectic skyway that criss-crossed the space seemingly at random. Bits of what looked like computer circuitry and hair were inserted into the waves of the scrim but also littered the floor creating a sense of dystopic anomie - the technological world as inherently dysfunctional, always broken and out of date. Sato’s apocalyptic sensibility was also in evidence in a large floor piece spread out amidst the columns of the nave at St Michael’s. Small piles of crumbling red and pink bricks and lumps of asphalt and broken stonework were unified by a scattering of earth, brick dust and grey paper pulp that seemed to map the aftermath of a disaster. Shards of white domestic sanitary ware threatened to church underfoot and there were occasional glimpses through the debris of photographs torn from newspapers showing cities and Japanese schoolgirls. Of course Hiroshima springs to mind but that devastation did not take much time at all. What take the time is the memory work, the re-forming and re- presenting of the losses of the past in order to make them manageable and to allow us to be able to enjoy life on a sunny day in Devon.
read more...

Of the three participants, Keiko Sato makes the most lasting impact with her ‘work in progress’. Seemingly intended as an ongoing preoccupation with no known conceivable end, it is a scattering of familiar domestic objects that splatter and shatter themselves across the smooth surface of the gallery as though of their own accord. Dishes, plants, rice, spaghetti, tea, coffee, flour, soil, clay, the detritus of daily life – urban reminders of the passing of time; a collage of both the sordid and sublime.
For all the spontaneity and apparent offhandedness of Sato’s piece, her art and method appear as one.
read more...

Miklos Beyer: What is the difference in working on a horizontal surface vs. working on a vertical surface?
Keiko Sato: The viewpoint is different. When working on the floor I stand and look down. My physical point of view determines to a large extent how I perceive things. Usually when I’m doing floor pieces I use objects, which I deconstruct by literally breaking their meaning so it becomes material. I was interested in transforming concrete material and everyday objects into a landscape. The floor is also near my feet. It is a base and I perceive it as something physical.
Working on the wall with images and words I perceive as working with my head. The material and input like photos, texts and thoughts all relate to real events. It feels as if I give an insight into what’s going on in my head.
When I worked too much on the wall I had to work on the floor piece. On the wall I focused on the upper side of my body and on the floor piece I focused on the lower part of my body.
The difference between the two is like comparing the practical with the imaginary.
To describe the wall piece right now is too difficult. It has similarities to working on the floor but it's very different. I linked images on the same intuitive level as I did when working on the floor, but there was a big difference in the emotional weight of the activity.

Miklos Beyer: Can you compare it with mowing the lawn or washing the dishes where the activity itself becomes subconscious?
Keiko Sato: Yeah maybe, it's an interesting thought.

Miklos Beyer: Are you trying to forget when you work on the floor piece?
Keiko Sato: Well, its like working with my subconscious, the moment I'm doing the work I don't fully realize what it is that I'm doing but afterwards I will remember the thoughts I had while doing it. During the making of a floor piece I sense that the material stimulates me to make and break forms, in a repeating fashion and so creating new forms, very similar to the making of a painting. Working with images and words is different in the sense that they bring me to other images, words and meaning. It seems similar to the process of multiplying but without the construction of form.
read more...

When I create a work, I first follow the nature, structure, quality and the meaning of materials and objects that I am dealing with.
For instance, I believe that the emotional meaning of cigarette butts lies in the fact that they are a remnant of human behaviour and desire. Ashes imply that something was burnt. They represent the process of disappearance and death. In the end, I use this emotional meaning and the organic structure of objects to give form to my work.

One day, I put a big glass tube (about 30cm x 150cm) on the floor in the corridor of the Art Academy. A man with limited eyesight knocked over the tube and smashed it completely. I went there and knew I had discovered something important, yet it was not clear to me what that something was. How the tube turned into pieces of glasses in one second was amazing. The tube was no longer there: only fragments remained. I then realized that in nature, everything changes, and that nothing is stable. When something disappears or is destroyed, something new begins. This discovery gave me an idea of destroying objects and making something new out of them, as if creating a new landscape with pre-existing materials.

In my work, the old and the new, and the end and the beginning are present at the same time. In other words, different concepts of time claim the same space. The works show and imply the direct and natural process of material changing.
For example, when the heat of the tea inside the cylinders melts the wax and clay, it leaks onto the floor spilling their contents.
Another example is in a recent work public can recognize the different states of growth of the beans in the same space.

The development of individualism has been very important in modern Europe. The strong sense of ‘individual’ in Europe seems to come from the conviction that human being is at the centre of the world. As a consequence, the past is ordered in a chronological way according to individual experience. In Japan, we tend to grasp history as a whole. For example, we are satisfied with the family tree, and do not try to remember each single name. In Europe, people develop by pursuing their personal desire, and by following a sense of responsibility and judgement. Having established their ego, people tend to relate differently to others. This is the reason why, in Europe, it is possible to objectify one’s feelings by transforming them into symbolic forms. In Japan, we tend to acquire a sense of coexistence. Consequently, we have a tendency to make connections with things around us rather than clearly objectifying them. For example, HAIKU is a unification of the state of nature and one’s feelings, not a simple expression of one’s emotions. This unification is expressed by a subtle connection between words.

In my work, I consider it important to have not only an emphasis on aggression, but also on conflicting aspects of things, such as order and disorder, life and death, violence and peace, beauty and ugliness, and humour and seriousness. Therefore, I could not totally agree with some public opinions which associated my work with Hiroshima and the War. I did not intend to create a work which would express war. However, if one goes deep into a well, one can find water, which connects to another water source. As one descends deeper into sub- and un- consciousness, one reaches a level that is undifferentiated from the unconsciousness of others. While I am working, I sometimes enter a state in which I am not sure if I am the one who is creating the work or the work is leading me. According to Freud, there is a division between consciousness and unconsciousness. However, in Buddhism, there is a different level of consciousness. Lowering the level of consciousness (think, for example, of meditation) does not mean that one loses the ability to judge, or to observe and to concentrate. In this sense, my work experiences at a hospital as a midwife and a nurse, and the fact that I moved to live in Europe, that I have a childhood memory of my father as a Kamikaze pilot, and that I grew up in post-war Japan, would all be represented unconsciously in my work. It would be no surprise if some part of my work stimulates and evokes other people’s deep memory.

* See the explanation of my recent project and work in a part of the interview in the L.A. Cinca news letter.