kohesi Initiatives is pleased to present be exist: you have decided not to die, a solo exhibition by Takashi Kuribayashi. Within this exhibition, the gallery becomes new ground for trees felled by industry, a continuation of the artist’s inquiry towards where the boundary lies between human and nature.
For more than three decades, Kuribayashi’s practice has been driven by one idea: boundaries. For him, a boundary is never just a line between two sides. It is the invisible zone in between, the act of crossing back and forth, and the social and political histories hidden in the lines humans draw, from national borders to the coastlines on a map. He builds large-scale environments that the audience must physically pass through, and beneath them runs a sustained concern with the relationship between humans and nature. Here, the trees become those boundaries made visible, and visitors are asked to cross them.
Hundreds, even thousands, of industrial trees are felled. Their bark, branches, and leaves are discarded, while the trunks are taken for mass production. Kuribayashi collects what remains and reconstructs it, filling the gallery space with trees that want to live again, or at the very least remind us that they once lived and gave life to us. Natural forests now cover less than half of Indonesia’s land area. The reconstructions are far from the perfection of nature, and in this imperfection he sets the wisdom of nature against the greed of human logic. In one work in this exhibition, a tree has lost its wood entirely. Only the bark remains, wrapping an empty space filled with shards of mirror. The hollow asks what has been lost, whether it will return, and who took it.
“I only listen to the trees calling me to bring them back,” Kuribayashi says.
Alongside these trees, Kuribayashi brings together two of his long-running works. Genki-ro, named from genki (health and vitality) and genshiro (nuclear reactor), reimagines the reactor as a source of human energy and health, and grew out of his engagement with nuclear issues after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima accident. Tanker Project imagines a tanker, usually a symbol of transporting energy and power, as a vessel carrying artists, people and nature together, where energy is emitted, absorbed, released and circulates. Both ask what energy means when seen from the human side. In the gallery, they join the trees as an open story, one that visitors complete by coming to see, experience, and feel these new spaces of life.