Okurimono

Since I started photographing in 1994, I’ve explored what lies within Man and that which is innately difficult to grasp. Man’s identity never ceases to fascinate me. My artwork is reflected through an internal process conveyed in an external expression through photography and film.

I often invite the viewer to explore his own thoughts on some of the surviving taboos of our time. The projects are an exploration of topics including old age, death and sexual identity, where I find Mans longing for something larger than him/herself to be a recurring theme.

At the moment I am working on two independent projects simultaneously. `Moksha(2007-2010) in India and `Okurimono` in Japan(2007-2010).

`Okurimono` is defined as `that which is in-between`, and encompasses a project which has evolved through five trips to Japan from 2007 to 2010. The images revolve around dreams, vulnerability, darkness and brutal truths.

In these four years of work I have gone further and further beyond my own comfort zone in search of truths which may cause unease for some people.

The first part of the project focuses on Japanese sub-culture, the Harajuku and their own search for a unique expression. Where dissonance between object and Man, in architecture and nature, is a recurring theme.

In the second part of the project I explore various expressions of sexual identity. Our digital society is drained of wonderment and any sense of the mysticism. Many aspire this in their day to day lives. The `okamas`-the transsexual `new halves` of Tokyo’s underground live out their complex truths in ritualized isolation. Many might see this as a threat to conventional gender categorizations, which substantiates the basis of our society. Reality and dreams; the ritualistic and play blend, in which the frail parameters between the known and the unknown dissolve.

The film gives the project an extra dimension for the senses, where experimental and ritual inspired settings reveal truths between pleasure and discomfort.

Christian Houge

Christian Houge – Now – Okurimono

Christian Houge guides us into a mystery. It resides between the ritualized shapes of the traditional and withdrawn Zen garden in Kyoto and the equally ritualized spaces of futuristic, urban Tokyo. For a westerner, Japan might look familiar, since what is held up for us looks like a futuristic spectacle somehow grounded in a western imagination. This judgment, however, is too easy. In Houge’s photographs, the sense of sameness withdraws and a very different feeling of strangeness creeps up on us. In fact, what this series registers is a remarkable place of alterity in today’s global order, a radical difference bang in the middle of the familiar.

This is pushed to the limit in the technological and virtual wonderland of Akihabara in Tokyo, where shop after shop trade in electronic products and computer games, while a weird costume play, “cosplay”, is being performed in streets. A similar kind of simulation is being acted out in the district of Harajuku, where Houge found some of his motifs. There is no authenticity here, no western “essence” or “reality”; instead, the virtual conquers the carnal body in a purified play of surface, image and the hyperreal. This is exotic. All the while as we are conscious of these notions as pinnacle points in a western idea of the post-modern. But in this sense Japan has always been “post-modern”. It has always integrated the most refined culture and technology from the outside while somehow retained an identity for itself. So, what would this identity be? Houge takes the view of ritual and play. Indeed, Japanese culture seems to be grounded solely on ritual, in business and in sex, in its relation to nature and in religion.

This play transcends the notion of authenticity altogether, unlike the West which is haunted by the “ghost” of origin and beginnings. In Japan, “now” would mean just that; it is a “no looking back”, but rather a flow of intensities integrated in the play and ritual of the ever-present, okurimono. There is no threat of being eaten up by western culture and technology here, for, like in Zen practice, the ritual oversees everything and has no historical drag. Japan becomes weightless, shot into orbit outside the material of earth itself.

Is acting out the role as Lewis Caroll’s Victorian girl driven by a sense of nostalgia? I think not. It is a striving for a moment of perfected presence, in dialogue with Houge’s optical machine. It is the moment of Now. The girl, the Zen garden and the image shares in a perfection modified by small uncertainties, coincidental imperfections that become somewhat oblique points of entry for us - a discarded handkerchief or seemingly unremarkable shapes and reflections in the prismatic play of surfaces.

There is a ghostly, otherworldly quality in these images, even in the fleeting blossoming cherrytree and the play of shadows across a concrete minimalism. The doubly exposed or reflected light on the lens reminds us of the uncertain beginnings in photography’s history, with its widespread belief that the camera was able to perceive more than the naked eye, like spirits and ghosts. In Houge’s images there are different specters, skeletal, natural shapes on the one hand, the machine and the virtual on the other. Here, like some scene from the film Blade Runner, there is an uncanny confusion and mix between the human and non human.

Maybe the search for a perfect moment in the perpetual flow of things is a romantic or melancholic longing for transcendent wholeness, a drive that is harnessed in a rigorous attention to visual detail. This compulsive discipline might seem absurd to any western observer, while longing itself form a common ground and will ultimately be the basis in our meeting.

Erling Bugge