OHTA Haruka

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OHTA Haruka

Participating Project	Exchange Residency Program (Japanese Creators sent abroad)
Activity Based	Japan
City / Place stayed	Taipei / Treasure Hill Artist Village
Period	2022.10 - 2022.12

Purpose of the residency

I want to think about what a scenery is and what it represents. There is something about the Taiwanese scenery that makes me perceive it as our own. What is it? I would like to explore the relationship between myself and the real scenery by examining changes from the recent past using Street View and the relationship between symbolic events and the scenery in contemporary history. 

Plan during the residency

• The Changing scenery of Taiwan and Taipei. 
  
• Contemporary Taiwanese history and its relationship to the scenery.
  
• A survey of architecture and building materials, one of the units of the scenery, and their trends 
• An investigation of matte paintings, which were once used to express fictional landscapes in cinema expression, and their development in relation to actual scenery. 
• What is scenery? What is architecture? What is the present?

Activities during the residency

I created works based on spatial inversion, fakery and multilayering, driven by my skepticism on the boundaries of architecture. This time, I focused on iron fences attached to windows, which are frequently seen in Taipei. They are used as an extension of the interior although they are outside the window, which gives the residents a sense of stealing public space. Based on this dualistic space where inside and outside coexist, and the situation where they seem to easily cross over the landscape, I developed a video in which the viewer is constantly inside the fence but goes out into the actual landscape, and an installation in which the outside is extended by creating a fence from the window of the exhibition room into the inside.

Outcome of the residency

As this was the first time I had been on a three-month residency abroad, it was quite difficult to find the right balance between my ideas and reality, and as a result I had an extremely busy schedule. With the support of staff, other artists and people I met in the area, helping me with research and sourcing materials, I could complete a significant volume of work, so it was not a failure at all. It was a great achievement for me to be able to create works that I was satisfied with during my residency in Taipei, which I had always been interested in.
It was quite an exceptional opportunity for an adult to stay abroad for three months. I don't know how many more times I will be able to spend such a long and luxurious time abroad in the future. I hope to keep in contact with the relationships I developed there. I believe visiting the same place more than once will give me a deeper insight into many things, rather than visiting a lot of different places. I hope to return to Taipei and Taiwan to develop my work even for a short period.

Creator Information