Reconstructing the World with the "Cosmos in the Fingers".
The Imagination of Mitsuhito Takeuchi
Recently, all of a sudden, I lost the sight in my right eye. At first I panicked, but when the doctor told me that the problem was caused by clogging of the artery taking blood to my eyeball, I saw it as an opportunity to take a fresh look at the issue of the the eye and hand in information theory. The human body is like a walled city surrounded by a broad wilderness. Is it possible to find a means of communication between the inside and outside? I thought about this problem in connection with the work of Mitsuhito Takeuchi, while lying in a hospital bed with an IV needle in my arm. Is it possible to bring a cosmic point of view into the labyrinthine city of the human body and make it visible? My condition stimulated me to think about ways of making the invisible world visible by creating signs that connect the microcosm and the macrocosm through sensory communication. Imagining the whole world as a macrocosm and the body as a microcosm makes it possible to transcend linear concepts of space and time. In the present day, we are lost in the midst of an overload of information and are in danger of losing sight of the world. Even when information takes on new appearances, it is often just a cunfusing mixture of the same old thing. Mitsuhito Takeuchi's imagination reduces this anarchic mass of information to simple signs, makes instantaneous discoveries in past and present progressive tense, and reconstructs the world by synchronizing the microcosm with the macrocosm. This imaginative violence is a means of preparing new traffic signs for the world. The information with which we are deluged clogs the arteries of our understanding in many different areas, in politics and economics as well as in artistic expression. We lose our capacity for communication and are placed in a condition of continual panic. Takeuchi expresses a cosmic environment in his art, demonstrating the necessity of reconstructing and activating a new symbolic sensibility. For Takeuchi, the cosmos resides in the fingers. Takeuchi firmly rejects the old form of Japanese imagination that has seen Korea as a place to be invaded. He believes that we must join hands to share the cosmos.
Yoshie Yoshida, art critic