A Massive Art Work, “Painted” With Typography
Ryo Shimizu’s 15-foot-by-41-foot typographic installation shows what a hybrid Chinese-English font might look like.
Everyone’s accustomed to seeing text on the walls of an art gallery. But not text that’s itself the work of art. And certainly not text that fills as much space as would a cement truck.
CNJPUS TEXT, by Japanese artist Ryo Shimizu, is a 15-foot-by-41-foot “painting” rendered in nothing but typography. Letters forming some 2,500 words cover an entire gallery wall, then scatter onto the floor helter-skelter like a spilled bag of ABCs.
The typeface is the artist’s own making, a hybrid of Roman and Chinese characters, and it’s designed to, as he says, summon the head-screwy feeling of “decoding cryptograms.”
Shimizu first installed CNJPUS TEXT in 2009. Initially, it showed a mob of assorted ciphers and a speech President Roosevelt delivered during WWII. But after displaying the piece a few times, Shimizu decided he wanted to “highlight the present more.” So he cobbled together text from “sights in my memory and dreams and also from events and cases, and social phenomena that actually took place,” he says. The result is a fable, of sorts, fragmented and largely incoherent.
Fragmentation is pretty much the point. The installation is about Japan’s culture of appropriation, in which everything originates from somewhere else, whether Japanese characters (a mashup of Chinese characters, kana, katakana, Arabic numerals, and Roman letters) or Japanese laws (influenced, in early history, by the Chinese model). Shimizu thinks that all this borrowing and adapting has had a pernicious effect on people, turning them into cultural amnesics, who don't know or don't care about history. The various iterations of CNJPUS TEXT are “an attempt to irradiate the forgetfulness of the modern-day society about the true meaning of things in their actual or real context,” he says.
Wait, what’s the installation about? We forget.
[Images courtesy of Ryo Shimizu]
