ARTWORK

The Voice within the Voice “People shouting from their windows during the lockdown in Shanghai / From Patrick Madrid’s post on X”
2024

Solvent inkjet print
H1950mm W1170mm D44mm

In this work, I examined the relationship between the voices of people speaking in various news videos and the things behind those voices.
Overlaid on the captured video images are various figures extracted from the sonographs of the audio tracks in these videos. Sonograph is a graph that breaks down sound into frequency bands and expresses the strength and weakness of the sound volume in each frequency band in terms of shading. It is a device for graphing human voices, animal noises, and the sounds of musical instruments, but in this work, I am extracting a graph of something that exists between voices, in other words, in the boundary region between voices and noise.

As a Japanese artist, I have been attempting to redefine “yohaku,” one of the traditional domains of beauty in Japan, in the contemporary art world. Unlike the Western concept of “negative space,” “yohaku” refers to a space where something exists but is left without form.
In this work, what appears on the captured images is something between the voices of the characters. They may be things that they did not dare to put into words. Or perhaps they are things that could not be put into words. So, to say, “yohaku” of their voices.