One method of exploring the origin of a painting is to think about the materials used. A painting reveals in its layers and composition its unique construction and physical origin. The particles that constitute the color are extracted essences distilled from minerals, plants, or animals. Blue hues are derived from plants such as indigo or cobalt, red hues from safflower, sappanwood, pomegranate, or cadmium. Secondary colors such as yellow, orange, and green are created from chrome compounds, black from remnants of fire such as ash, white from titanium, brown from oxidized steel. Materials such as cobalt and cadmium (both of which are poisonous) are used in products such as plastic, and in this way, the emotional register of color is forced to overlap with the synthetic properties of industry. Painting can then be seen as an act of revealing the world by deconstructing matter and breaking down color. In other words, those particles used to make up the primordial universe provide the framework for their own re–presentation on canvas. The act of painting allows for a renewed investigation of the nature of matter by representing the material world. When we look at pigment painted on a surface, the viewer is faced with a kind of innate structure where fundamental building blocks of the universe (for example carbon, water, iron, calcium, and phosphorus) recreate a world (a world that includes all life forms) made up of those same particles.

Yuko Shiraish’s works primarily concern color. In her paintings and sculptures it is difficult to define exactly what the colors represent. Creating countless color samples, recording their conditions and contexts, and arranging these different hues cannot be done based on a general set of knowledge and experiences. There is one certainty about the obscure and non–verbal condition of color: that there is a common human experience based on the mysterious system of perception and conditions of light and chroma. The abstract nature of color is an issue that had already been explored in Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist paintings. Yuko Shiraishi’s paintings are inheritors of these ideas having been directly influenced by post–1950s Color Field painters such as Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. She began her career as an artist in the early 1980s, when as a young artist in her twenties, she chose to look not towards the dominant movements of the time such as Neo–expressionism or the Trans–avantgarde but rather the themes of a much earlier generation. And unlike the trend at that time towards heroic, historical works on a grandiose scale, Shiraishi worked on relatively diminutive, human–scale canvases, exploring her ideas by painting thin layers of color. Through an emphasis on horizontal and vertical lines, her paintings are distinct in their clarity and meticulousness of hue as well as the brightness of her color arrangement.

Yuko Shiraishi’s exhibition at Kukje Gallery is primarily comprised of life–size paintings in which thin horizontal lines and faint dots combine to construct rendered space. The canvas surface, neither overly large nor small, illustrates compositional depth and width that is difficult to gauge, and the lines that cross that space are incalculable. It is only the contours of her minutely layered irregular brushstrokes that provide focus for the viewer’s gaze. According to the artist, these sparsely scattered dots serve as indices of measurement to help perceive the topological space of her painting’s expanse. In this way, they are analogous to the way in which starlight frames the infinite expanse of the universe.

Despite Shiraishi’s somewhat traditional attitude towards color composition, there are different aspects in her work that cannot simply be attributed to historical influences. In part, these elements of her work can be seen as being related to her belonging to a generation deeply immersed within the social and cultural developments of 1960s Japan. Shiraishi spent her childhood exposed not only to traditional literature, classical music and fine art, but also popular subcultures such as movies, pop music and comics – art forms that spurred her psychological development with more obscure and obtuse narratives. One way to get insight into Shiraishi’s work is to learn about her parents: her father was a well–known avant–garde film director and her mother a world–famous poet of the ‘beat’ culture. Furthermore, having studied and lived in Europe during her childhood, her cultural references include both Eastern and Western intellectual influences. This marriage of opposites lends an interesting dimension to Shiraishi’s attraction to outer space. The merger of an Oriental outlook (a distinct subject matter in Japanese mass culture) with fantasy literature–which uses theories of modern science as its foundation–offers a compelling explanation of her interest in the science fiction genre. Analogous metaphysical systems including Buddhist philosophy regarding the formation of space, architecture, and the themes of Utopia and Arcadia, further help to explain the way in which Japanese culture interprets space, and how these themes may affect the artist’s eclectic oeuvre. These strong interests in spatial concepts as well as metaphysical ideas inform the artist’s color paintings and serve as a reference point for the gradual evolution of her works to include public and site–specific works.

The artist’s Space Elevator Tea House from 2009 serves as a critical turning point for her work. The sculpture recreates a full scale traditional Japanese teahouse (four and a half tatami mats in size). For her exhibition at London’s Annely Juda Gallery that same year, she showed a model of an actual satellite orbiting 35.8 km above the earth. The historical concept of a Space Elevator is derived from an idea put forth by the Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935). At the time his idea was pure science fiction as elevators are firmly connected to the ground. However, after the introduction in 1959 of a hypothesis that uses counter–balanced forces outside of earth’s geostationary orbit in addition to cables, the Space Elevator has again been regarded and researched as something that is potentially feasible. In addition, another maverick idea was more recently proposed that could revolutionize the idea of the Space Elevator by using more durable cables. This idea, known as a carbon nitrotube (also referred to as Carbon–60, Fullerenes, Buckyball, Buckminsterfullerene) was proposed by Robert Curl, Harold Korto and Richard Smalley in 1985. Shiraishi’s Space Elevator Tea House explores all of these visionary ideas and conveys the significance of expanding infinitely into space as interpreted in the artist’s color paintings.

For Shiraishi, the possibility of painterly colors is not limited to the properties of pigment but can be enlarged into a reciprocal network that comprises all the matter that makes up the universe. Color is not simply paint but rather an optical mediator, and its allure is mirrored within the fundamental interconnectedness of the universe. Therefore in her work, the audience can experience the contemplative act of drinking tea as people have done in the past, but in a state of zero–gravity in non–directional outer space. In the artist’s version of a teahouse, the two entryways are painted in red. The bigger entryway is for the owner, while the smaller one is for guests. This may be a safety measure against a potentially armed samurai (historically a smaller aperture was used in order that a guest discard his sword before entering), but it is also possible to view the opening as having Buddhist symbolism: that within the teahouse, one transcends all human relationships. If the act of drinking tea in the teahouse is focused on experiencing a state of forgetting the self, repeating that act 35.8 km above the ground can be thought of as a parallel act of letting go and becoming separated from the gross polarities of the world. That being said, a cable still runs through the middle of this teahouse in space, connecting it to earth. It acts as the sole link between earth and the teahouse, orbiting with the rotational velocity of the earth. In Shiraishi’s sculpture this cable is composed of a bunch of tensile filaments, shimmering like a flowing mass of immaterial energy. The satellite represents the dichotomy as represented in nirvana and the Buddhist state of pratityasamutpada.⁴ It is removed, orbiting the earth, while at the same time, connected to life on earth. Shiraishi’s Space Elevator Tea House embodies the artist’s interests in and embrace of the complex intersection of pop culture, modern physics, traditional architecture and religious philosophy. This combination of fantasy and engineering makes this work one of the most unique and compelling artistic projects of the 21st century.