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56April 23 (Tue) – May 26 (Sun), 2024
Weekdays 11: 00 – 19 : 00
Sundays and holidays 11: 00 – 18 : 00
Closed Mondays (including national holidays falling on Monday)
Organized by Shiseido Company, Limited

4In this exhibition, Hirotoshi Iwasaki explores the artistic potential of rotoscoping, an animation technique based on tracing over live-action

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film footage.
The title of this exhibition, Daughter of Butades
Butades, is derived from a myth contained in Natural History (Volume 35), a book by the ancientReceptionRoman writer Pliny the Elder (23-79AD). In the ancient Greek city of Corinth, Kora, the young daughter of a potter named Butades, attemptedskia cast on the wall by a lamp. This drawing is said to be
to stop her lover from being sent off to war by tracing the contours of his shadow (skia),
the origin of painting. Moreover, Butades subsequently molded and fired the image in clay. This clay figure is said to be the origin ofsculpture.

4 Skia1 Picture #1 for Daughter of Butades
Charcoal on paper

For this exhibition, Iwasaki created an animated work by tracing footage of people and landscapes that he was unable to see due to thepandemic. Iwasakiʼs use of this process as a form of reminiscence is akin to Koraʼs drawing. While focusing on the origin (arche)
arche of marking
and retaining absence through the act of depiction and creation, the work examines the nature of memory.

Acrylic print, LED light

Using the rotoscope technique, Iwasaki began by drawing and shooting aThis work was made by shining a light on an image that was traced from ascene on a sheet of paper before erasing the image and repeating the samemoving picture and projecting its shadow on the wall. While Butadesʼ

process over and over again. As a result, erasure marks from the series ofdaughter depicted an image using the shadow as a medium, in this work,

images remained in the original picture. Drawing and erasing are acts ofIwasaki mediates the image he made again and express it as a shadow.

continuously remembering and forgetting, and the erasure marks, which

There are landscapes that we can no longer see and people that we can no longer meet.

appear as traces, form a trajectory of memory.

Shadows have an ambiguous meaning, suggesting spirits, ghosts, illusions,and portraits. The Greek words skia and eidolone have similar connotations,

What do we remember when faced with such an absence?
2 Picture #2 for Daughter of Butades

Each time we call up a landscape from our memory, it undergoes a slight change.

and the Japanese word iei not only refers to a portrait of a dead person, butalso the deceasedʼs spirit or ghost. It is also important to remember that

Charcoal on paper

It might even be that we are creating new memories whenever we remember something.

shadows are related to the psychological and anthropological concept of theIn effect, we are creating rather than reproducing.

As rotoscoping normally involves repeatedly drawing and erasing in

Searching for things of this kind, which only appear when they start to move,accordance with the timeline of a moving picture, the earlier scenes (i.e., theI began tracing several yearsʼ worth of motion picture footage that I had on hand.

past) remain as traces. However, it is also possible to animate these scenes byI traced the shadows of images and made drawings of reminiscences rooted in memory.

tracing the timeline in reverse and playing them backwards. Thus, the future

doppelgänger.
5 Translucent Memories
Acrylic print

remains as a trace as the drawings emerge.

When I detect a sign of imminent movement at this way stop in the here and now,

In this work, traces of motifs and erasure marks were printed on acrylic

I am reminded of Nishiwaki Junzaburo's poem "Eternatus."

panels, overlapping to create a scene from Daughter of Butades . Viewed

3 Daughter of Butades

Hirotoshi Iwasaki

Animation, 8min. 27sec.

Video should be within 30 sec.

Made in cooperation with Junichi Nishiwaki and Midori Moriyama

Hirotoshi Iwasaki

individually the images and marks appear to be fragmented and andunrelated, but when they are layered and connected, they assume theappearance of a continuous scene. The work is neither transparent nor

1981 Born in Ibaraki
2019 Ph.D., Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Intermedia Art

This rotoscope animation was made by tracing moving images of people andopaque, it is translucent and occupies a place between the visible andlandscapes that Iwasaki was unable to see due to the pandemic.

invisible. In that sense, it is akin to our memories, which are created when anumber of scattered fragments are accumulated, layered, linked, andLives in Aichi"He" ruminates on his memories as he traces the outline of a motif, recallingconnected.

things like everyday landscapes, his late grandmother, and an earthquake.

Career highlights to date

By tracing the images, his memories move back and forth from the past to2021 "Motion"Motion Studies:Studies: Five
Five Contemporary
Contemporary Animators"Animators", Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College, USA

the present and on into the future.

2015 "Poetic"Poetic Iconography
Iconography // Hirotoshi
Hirotoshi Iwasaki"Iwasaki", MOTOAZABU GALLERY, Kofu, Japan
Artist HP: https://hirotoshiiwasaki.com/

6 Zoetrope for Daughter of Butades
Paper, iron

The movement of the original live-action images and the mishmash ofIn this work, Iwasaki used a zoetrope to create a scene from Daughter of

pictorial images that arises from tracing them exist somewhere betweenzoeButades . The word "zoetrope" is made up of the Greek words for life (zoe)reality and fantasy, and presence and absence.

and turning (trope),
trope and the device might be seen as a prototype foranimation. When the viewer peers through the slits of the spinning wheel at

Notes
・Information on the works consists of the title followed by the material.
・All of the works were produced in 2024.
HPInstagramX

a sequence of still images, they are transformed into a moving picture due tothe effects of residual imagery. Iwasaki explains that "Movement appears
only when it is intervened (turned), which is like tracing one's own memory."