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松井紫朗 • Shiro Matsui

Reading the Art Museum - 
Hyokeikan and the Art of Today

During the first realization of PARASCOPE, in the National Museum of Tokyo, Matsui reduced the awe-inspiring loftiness of the sacral architecture of Japan's oldest museum by installing a bright realm of color.  Looking upwards at the high ceiling was only possible through a tube-like structure in to which only one viewer at a time could slip. The glance through the auratic colored space made the vault seems less huge. The altered perception led one to see the altered cupola as a flat ornamental picture. From above one looked down in to a maw possessed of a mysterious suction.

Berndt Schulz
Excerpt from catalogue essay for The Outside's Inside, Heidelberg Kunstverein, 2004
Parascope 
spandex, steel, 830x455 cm
(installation view Tokyo National Museum, 2001)
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