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Since 2019, Iikawa’s iconic work lets a hidden rope carry gestures elsewhere. A bag stirs outside, unseen by its initiator—spectatorship dissolves into distance, delay, and chance.
Pulling ropes alone or together, viewers set hidden motions afar. Iikawa’s Pulling Time (since 2023) unfolds unseen links between bodies, distance, and time.
“Why is this cat hiding?” This work is a question to its viewers. Iikawa’s Mr. Kobayashi the Pink Cat cannot be conveyed by color, shape, or size. It questions the very act of recording, focusing instead on the impulse of encounter.
In every exhibition by Iikawa, a bag rests in silence, as if forgotten. Most pass by, unaware. Yet for those who notice and lift it, Very Heavy Bag transforms weight into revelation, dwelling between absence and discovery.
Through trial and error, viewers push and shift wall-like structures, uncovering fragments of new perspectives. The whole space—its ungraspable volume—remains elusive, revealed only through acts of engagement.
Carrying Very Heavy Bag is not just transport—it creates space. In Make Space, Use Space, the audience’s act blurs art and life, turning movement itself into a question of how space comes into being.
Measure for My Future Cat envisions Mr. Kobayashi the Pink Cat at 400 meters wide, 270 meters tall, 50 meters thick. Though impossible to build alone, Iikawa treats the act of imagining vast, unrealizable scale as the shortest path toward creation.
Large yellow panels suggest a bench, slope, or wall, yet resist fixed meaning. The gap between vision and sensation exposes how expectation, past experience, and déjà vu can mislead perception—quietly opening space for renewed awareness.
Ropes traverse divided spaces, linking inside and outside as if sketching a living blueprint. From shifting viewpoints, alignments appear and dissolve—connections the eye alone cannot hold, but the body senses across distance.
An early work of the Decorator Crab series, it began with photographs of impulse’s periphery and later evolved into sculptural form. Surrounding clues—colors, textures, atmospheres—evoke unseen events, letting perception itself become the work.
The goalkeeper, often idle at the match’s edge, seems almost apart from the team. This video lingers on his quiet centimeters of adjustment, revealing tension and unseen labor that asks: is he truly one of them?
This is a 24-hour clock—yet without hands or numbers. Morning, noon, night: the same view shifts into countless scenes. It does not measure time, but proposes a way to perceive its unseen layers.
Recent drawings include boxers, football goalkeepers, and anthropomorphic cats and rabbits, alongside plan drawings for installations. Each captures impulse, play, and imagined scenes that later unfold in larger works.
These paintings depict companions of Mr. Kobayashi the Pink Cat, characters I have drawn since 1999, on canvases made from the pink fabric used in his 2022 Hakone installation. They connect with plan drawings and installations such as Pulling Time, Arrangement, Adjustment, Movement, and Very Heavy Bag.
© 2025 Studio Takehiro Iikawa. All rights reserved.
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