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Decorator Crab – Arrangement, Adjustment, Movement《デコレータークラブ—配置・調整・周遊》, 2022
Installation view: “Range of the Senses: What It Means to “Experience” Today"
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Dimensions variable. Wood, aluminum truss frame, caster, paint
Photo: © Takehiro Iikawa, courtesy of the artist
About the Decorator Crab Series
The Decorator Crab project is inspired by a marine creature that camouflages itself by attaching objects from its surroundings. In its unadorned state, it would likely pass unnoticed—an invisibility that mirrors my interest in the impulse sparked by an unexpected encounter.
To preserve such moments, the project deliberately withholds information. Works may be placed in public or private spaces without revealing their title, size, medium, or location. Partial traces—photographs, printed matter, videos, sculptures—circulate, but the content remains fragmentary. The subject of the photographs is rarely the work itself, but rather its “witnesses”: people, objects, or landscapes suggesting its presence.
Each iteration differs in form and context, making Decorator Crab difficult to detect. The number of viewers may be none, or only a few. Yet for those who happen upon it, the surrounding landscape can suddenly shift into something subtly uncanny.
Since 2007, the project has unfolded in diverse sites worldwide, exploring perception, absence, and the limits of documentation. By scattering elusive presences and controlling what is revealed, it invites rare, unrepeatable encounters where the viewer’s awareness becomes the true site of the work.
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.
© 2025 Studio Takehiro Iikawa. All rights reserved.
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