Tomohito Ishii once dug a hole in an empty lot in the suburban town where he was born and raised. This act might appear to be a nostalgic scheme — as though digging back through the strata of the past to imaginatively recover a home town lost to new town development. Yet I do not think that was the case. For it is none other than the suburb itself that is Ishii's home town. A typical way of describing a suburb is that its scenery could be anywhere.
While this nondescript quality is in one sense true, the memory of a scenery or a place is not inscribed into the scenery or place itself. It resides, rather, within a person. And so for those born and raised there, a suburb is at once scenery that could be anywhere and scenery that is singular. It is precisely this sense of the "suburb" — laden with such duality — that I believe liberates Ishii's practice from the self-fulfillment of nostalgic sentiment. The expansion of suburbia can be understood as a utopian movement that absorbs the diverse external spaces existing as individually distinct cultures into a homogenized and uniform interior — an intervention not unlike colonialism, forcing assimilation upon heterogeneous land. It is against this backdrop that Ishii so frequently depicts potted plants. Not plants in their natural state, forming closed ecosystems particular to their environment, but artificially produced individuals — interchangeable, transplantable anywhere — rendered as though they were self-portraits. The astigmatic outlines, misaligned yet overlapping, lay bare the fictiveness of these plants as constructed artifacts, while the desynchronized patchwork of lines, surfaces, and colors reads as nakedly digital. As if to say: it is precisely in that hollowness that reality resides.
"House of future" Press release