"If you can say it... Why paint it?" A review of the key concepts of Contemporary Art

Kings Cross, London 2007 by Naoki Honjo

Naoki Honjo is a popular Japanese artist that blurs the border between reality and fiction by using a technique that uses the macro photography visual codes and transposes them to large city views. As some of you may be not particularly familiar with photography techniques, I will show you an example to illustrate this. Do you remember 'crazy art nation' introduced in the post 'another brick in the wall'.

Look closer at how does the picture appear. You will see that the picture gets its maximum of sharpness on the little character that represents Mark Wallinger. The foreground and the background get blurred due to the size of the object and the distance between the scene and the camera lens.

Arts Crazy Nation

Amery Carson

The point here, is that a 'visual culture' exists. Look at the picture above. It is a flower and it is not really hard to guess... But think about it... How do you know it is a flower? There are a few clues: the colors, the water drops, the organic aspect of the subject. The depth of field is one important clue. You have seen many of this flowers close-up and the small depth of field is one of the elements you expect when we show you such pictures. It is part of your visual culture!

When Naoki Honjo shows you a picture of buildings, roads and buses; with such a small depth of field, your brain may conclude that the objects shot on the picture are incredibly small... Probably a model... But no! Not this time, this is 'real', a picture of the actual London.

We might therefore say that Naoki Honjo cheats with our system of perception.

From another angle, we could imagine that a god-like photographer took the picture, starring at us the way we would stare at an ants colony... The presence of something superior, gigantic that looks at us from above and could crush everything we take for unbreakable, with a single finger.

Furthermore, the scenes look like big toys, dolls house, lego (?!) something that questions the social movements, the way we evolve in the city, representational modes.

Saitama-Arena, Saitama, Japan, 2004 by Naoki Honjo

Containers, Tokyo, Japan 2005 by Naoki Honjo

London Buses, 2007 by Naoki Honjo

This is a crystal clear demonstration that the gaze at the artwork is biased on a quite powerful manner by the stereotype we hold about the picture features (here the point of view and the particular depth of field). What I would like to point at, is that we hold stereotypes about everything, it is simply the way the brain works! We may be largely unaware of the stereotypes we hold... The more obvious are the ethnic ones, African are like this, French like that... But Naoki Honjo brilliantly demonstrates us, using quite a poetic channel that it may not be that simple!