Reflecting time and space

Minami Tada's sculptures do not necessarily draw your attention, but they sure make you see the space around them in a new way.

Beyond Time and Space is the current retrospective exhibition of the Japanese sculptor at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The 18 sculptures and 60 photos on exhibit, encompassing the four decades of her career, show how sculptures can liquify space.

Born in 1924, Tada was trained in oil painting in college before switching to three-dimensional works. Soon after experimenting with plastic, wood, stone and bronze, she discovered her favorite material -- stainless steel. For Tada, natural materials such as stone and wood, are above being sculpted because of their inviolate natural beauty. Trying to shape them artificially is too arrogant a thing to do. Out of her appreciation for nature, she decided to create her works with stainless steel, glass and acrylic, the kinds of materials that display minimal tones of color while either letting through or reflecting the light without imposing their presence on the surrounding space.

This interest in light promoted her toward lighting design. The Lighting Sculpture series, exquisite chandeliers with a classical touch, still decorate Japan's royal residence. At the same time, she produced lamps and garden lighting, many of which can be found at Japanese embassies and five-star hotels around the world. For viewers who may not have the chance to visit these establishments in person, the exhibition includes photos of these spectacular works.

When planning these "lighting sculptures," Tada first considers the spaces in which they are going to be installed, taking into account the textures of the building, the climate of the location and even the effect of passing time on the works. Two examples of this calculation are located in the lobby of the Taiwan Cement Building on Chungshan N. Rd. To appropriately match its solemn geometrical patterns of the floor and the creamy warm color of the interior, Tada made a chandelier in the shape of an octagon in a gravitating spectrum of colors while her characteristic cluster of small bulbs covered in crystallized glass add a lightness to balance the massive structure.

The sculptures on exhibit make interesting use of TFAM's galleries with their reflective surfaces. Carrying through on Constantin Brancusi's idea of integrating the surroundings into the sculptures with their reflective surface, the works play with not only space but time as well.

Myo, shaped like a dorsal fin emerging above ground, illustrates an imaginary tug of war between two dimensions. The opposing walls of the gallery cave in to each other as viewers move closer to one surface and then the other of the fin. On either surface, or imaginary dimension, the image of the viewer can be expanded infinitely or shrunk into a tiny spot. The predictable interaction between a person's image and its surroundings was turned into many possibilities.

Frequency 37306505MC shows six hemispheres on a flat surface. Working like magic mirrors, they distort the images of the viewer in six different ways. In one, the viewer simply disappears while in some others, the viewer sees more than one of reflection of themselves, though one of these images may lack a head or a leg. This mirror game inspires one to imagine that each of us may have many different existences in different dimensions simultaneously. While these various versions of ourselves share some physical or mental attributes, their manner of existence may be beyond our imagination.