Beyond a Thousand Doors, No WorldOn Ryohei Kan’s ‘Endless Gallery’
Christian Hartard

One used to have two options on entering a museum: Look at the paintings or look outof the window. Sometimes, what was happening outside was more interesting. And
sometimes, the paintings were more beautiful, fantastical or more real than reality itself.
One could, however, always basically rely on finding the same world in the window
frame as in that of the picture. Alberti, in his treatise ‘De Pictura’ from 1435, alreadycompared painting with an open window, through which the artist sees the world (and uswith him). And when, later on, as with Vermeer or Caspar David Friedrich, the window
appeared in the painting, then it was a reflexive reference to a charged relationshipbetween real and depicted reality, but also a metaphor for a world neverthelessaccessible by art. This certainty was taken from us by the autonomization andabstraction upheavals of modernism. The symbol for art, which provides for its own
context that it references, is the outwardly isolated ‘white cube’ of the contemporary
museum: An aesthetic cleanroom, which, as a closed reference system, ascertains thatart sticks to its own – but also does not mix with daily life.

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
www.yamamotokeiko.cm

Ryohei Kan’s ‘Endless Gallery’ is a heightening of these relations to the absolute. The
camera pushes stoically through an intricate suite of rooms and gropes its way through aglaring neon-lit passage, gliding across white surfaces of walls and the fine textures ofthe floor, from door to door. The total spaces contain nothing but themselves: Nopaintings into the imaginary world, no windows into reality. Their sterile emptinessemits a hard-to-grasp, disciplining violence, reminiscent of clinics or hospitals. They
seem to be waiting: For visitors, patients, inmates. Thus, the ‘Endless Gallery’ is utopia
and dystopia, concurrently. It tells of the autonomy of art, which makes up its own
realities and thereby isolates itself from the rest of the world.

Ryohei Kan’s critical parable of the 'white cube’ is not just remarkable in that it
paradoxically functions exactly within the conditions that it demonstrates, but also inthat it contains moments in which the filmic imagery suddenly skips into reality: Whenthe viewer feels as if he or she is being sucked into the larger-than-life projected spaces;
when the ticking rhythm of steps or the nervous humming of a broken fluorescent lightare burnt into our brains; when the rocking movement of the camera, the panning shots,
the spinning-in-circles, causes a feeling of disorientation and physical discomfort aftertime; when we notice that the invisible body within this space – is us.

Some of the doors that we pass in Ryohei Kan’s labyrinth remain closed. Maybe theylead into further endless loops or dead ends – or they are emergency exits into real life.
The only skill lies in finding the right one.

translation from German:
Anna McCarthy
Christian Hartard

b. Munich, 1977, works as an artist and art historian. He holds an M.A. and PhD from the University ofMunich and diplomas from the German School of Journalism and the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. He
was a Fritz Thyssen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munich Institute of Art History 2010 — 2012 and aLecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich 2013 — 2018.
http://www.hartard.com

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
www.yamamotokeiko.cm