Tomohito Ishii once dug a hole in an empty lot in the suburban town he grew up in. What may appear to some as an act of digging down to reach earth's strata of yesteryear as a nostalgic scheme to imaginatively recover the home town he lost when development of the new town began, I, for one, believe that was not the case. For Ishii, it is none other than the suburb that is his home town. A typical description of a suburb is that it's scenery is indistinguishable from other suburbs. While, in a way, the nondescript nature of suburbs may be true, the memory of a scenery or a place is not etched into the actual scenery or place itself. The memory resides in a person's home. While the scenery may indeed be the same with other suburbs, to the person growing up there, it is also special.
Perhaps this impression of the suburb with its duality is what has unshackled Ishii's creative process from having to fulfill purpose into nostalgic sentiment. The phenomenon of the expansion of suburbia can also be seen as a utopian movement of taking the diverse external spaces existing as individually distinct cultures and absorbing them into a homogenized yet unified inner part, an intervention similar to the colonization of foreign land and forceful assimilation. That is why Ishii often draws potted plants. Instead of drawing plants in its natural form, as enclosed ecosystems characterized by their environment, he draws artificially-produced plants, as interchangeable substances that can be transplanted anywhere. And the plants are drawn as though they are self-portraits. The distorted outlines are misaligned yet overlapping, guiding imagination as a produced structure, showing the rawness in its digital patchwork of lines, surfaces, and colors lacking synchronization. It is as though it is saying reality can be found in that hollowness.
"House of future" Press release