Masanori Handa

Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, Masanori Handa received a BA in design from the Tokyo University of the Arts. His installations are often enigmatic combinations of real-world elements and those that stem from fictional origins. In 2009 he participated in the prestigious Rolex Art Initiative Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which offered the opportunity of a one-year mentorship with Rebecca Horn in Berlin.

The constant focus in Handa’s work relates to psychogeography, a study of the emotional effects the geographic environment can create in human consciousness. He surmises that it is a result of his proclivity since childhood to closely examine his surroundings through audiovisual, olfactory, and tactile senses, and to detect elements of fear and uncertainty in those perceptions. In his 2005 installation Shirahama Aomatsu Nuclear Power Plant Calabash Handa placed a gourd-shaped bathtub filled with hot water in the center of a gallery and suspended a fresh calabash gourd above it. The gradual withering of the calabash became part of the work, giving the audience a chance to contemplate on possible associations between the effect of the passage of time on the gourd and their own experience of the passing of time. In retrospect, Handa realized that the apparent randomness of his composition was connected to different memories, as if his subconscious was performing associative thinking using his memory bank as its playground, bringing to the fore rows of pine trees planted along his seaside hometown as a windbreak; an image of a massive calabash he somehow suddenly ‘saw’ in front of the pine trees; and gourds in a flower bed by a nuclear powerplant in Fukui Prefecture in Japan. All these elements merged together to unfold in one scene subtly implying potential disaster.

His more recent installation nakakiyo no entakukei (2015) was also developed out of associations of various references and an assortment of materials such as trailing vines, timber, cement, and canvas. The intricate installation is a simulation of a low-lying delta; a topography created by meandering rivers and natural phenomena including rainfall, temperature change, humidity, and wind. In Handa’s version, the landscape is playfully made up of a series of round tables, potted bonsai plants, and other everyday objects scattered around. Alluding to the traditional Japanese practice of miniature landscape making, bonkei (tray landscape)—Handa’s made-up term ‘entakukei’ literally meaning ‘round-table landscape’—nakakiyo no entakukei invited the audience to immerse themselves in an affective environment filled with mysteries.

Handa’s contribution to HT22 is a new direction for the artist. The single-channel video work is composed as a series of moving drawings, each frame capturing an impressionistic glimpse along shorelines of islands in Hawaiʻi and those from his hometown in Kanagawa. Assembled, the work takes on an atmosphere of snapshots from a road trip but without a straightforward direction or a set destination. Poetic, abstract, and ambiguous, the work ultimately shows the Pacific Ocean as a constant entity that represents a continuum of space and time.