Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Butterfly flying in the room

May 12, 2010 10:46 am / Add a comment

I basi­cally like to talk about the things that invoke strong pos­i­tive feel­ings in me.  That’s my very first rea­son to choose work.  It has to be some­thing that I can talk about positively.  I’ve con­vinced Takeshi Ishig­uro to let me work for him,  because I love his art, and work­ing with him would give me the oppor­tu­nity to talk about his fan­tas­tic art, and by doing that, hope­fully he would be con­nected to more peo­ple who appre­ci­ated his work and who are will­ing to pay appro­pri­ate amount of money for them.

Every time I visit Takeshi’s lab,  he shows me some­thing dif­fer­ent that excites me, makes me laugh out loud joyfully.  Yes­ter­day, he’s turned on his but­ter­fly robot for me and Aico.  I’ve seen this in his col­lec­tion of videos, but it was the first time see­ing the real one in action.  The effect was mesmerizing.  It’s a large bright blue butterfly,  made of arti­fi­cial mate­r­ial, sus­pend­ing from the ceil­ing like a marionette.  Easy to see that it’s on strings, easy to see the large mechan­i­cal con­trap­tion on the ceiling.  The mechan­i­cal con­trap­tion even makes notice­able noise.  But when Takeshi turned on the switch, and the but­ter­fly started flap­ping its wings and started float­ing around the room, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.  It was so grace­ful, so del­i­cate, so full of life, yet so fragile.  It was excit­ing when it floated by right in front of me.   I was a lit­tle sad when we had to start our meet­ing and Takeshi turned off the switch.  I could have watched that but­ter­fly, maybe for another hour.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, Takeshi com­mented that it’s not “thing” that he wanted to create.  He wanted to cre­ate “phenomenon”.  With this insight, smoke ring,  ash sculp­ture, slow motion bench, mer­cury foun­tain, and all oth­ers, I see that what cap­tures me and gives me the feel­ing of hap­pi­ness are the beau­ti­ful phe­nom­e­non, fleet­ing moments that each of these works create.

My rea­son to work for him is per­haps just an excuse to expe­ri­ence these phe­nom­e­non first hand.  I’ve seen the same reac­tion I had in other peo­ple over and over again.  It’s my job to spread this joy, this hap­pi­ness he creates.

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