Garden of the Appellation 1992 - 2012
E I J I W ATA N A B E
" Garden of the Appellation "
Press Release:essor gallery London
Eiji Watanabe's installation explores ideas of recognition andre-creation, and how they can become part of our cultural self-perception.He describes how 'one day, in a bookshop, I was looking at the illustrated books of plants and mushrooms. Each leaf was laid out beautifully with each name in the book.' Watanabe 'came to be impressed by how the human being draws a distinction and categorize and how they name'.His attention was also held by the subtle differences between each specimen, and how the illustrations revealed these by enlarging details on some species, and reducing the scale for others.
Watanabe's interest resulted in the installation,Garden of the Appellation, 1992-2002, for which he has painstakingly cut out the botanical illustration, and arranged the cut outs on the floor in a simulation of their natural habitat. Separated from their names and their bibliographic home the plants are given a new visual comparative context. The illustrations are scaled for a book, and drawn so that the plants can be identified from the wild. Intheir re-planting on the gallery floor our eye recognises that their scale and comparative sizes are wrong, an unnatural natural habitat.
Watanabe refers to this as 'Great Nature that transcends Nature' -the natural desire of humanity to examine, dissect and name, and then finally re-create as a way of understanding and ordering the world. These plants have been removed from their natural environment to be recreated as images in a book, and then dissected from the book to be cultivated on the floor.The same urge which inspired the early botanists is at work here, Watanabe is creating a garden, re-creating nature in an attempt to improve, inform and understand: 'When I cut out the pictures from the book and lay that 'impossible nature' on the whole floor, I get the actual feeling (realization), or I get more sense of reality than the actual 'nature'.'
Eiji Watanabe was born in Japan in 1961 and works in Aichi. He has exhibited in Nagoya and Tokyo,and this is his first exhibition outside Japan. The first "Garden of the Appellation" was shown at STEGOSAURUS-STUDIO, a non-commercial art gallery in Nagoya in 1992
E.W STUDIO 2 1992
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E.W STUDIO 1 1992
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S T E G O S AU RU S S T U D I O 1992
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E.W STUDIO 3 1997
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TO K I WA G A L L E RY
T O K YO 1997
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"Innosent Mi nds" Shin Morikita Yo s h i t o m o N a r a Nobuhiko Nukata Hiroshi Sugito H i r o f u m i To y a m a E i j i Wa t a n a b e
Ai c hi Pr efec tural M us eu m o f A r t
N AG OYA
1997
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" Encounter " Anne Daems Plamen Dejanov & Swetl ana H eger Jan Fabre + Ilya Kabakov Shimabuku + Nomura Makoto Watanabe Eiji Jun Yang
Tok yo Opera C i ty Ar t G al l er y
TOKYO
2001
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"A r t i n the H ome" i n YAM AGU CH I
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Candy Factor y Paul C ar ter Franci s D enys Kate Gray Billy M cCal l Janice McN ab Ol a Pehr son Shimabuku M ichihiro Yoshiyuki Shi rakawa Sean Snyder Eiji Watanabe
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I n s t a l l a t i o n v i e w a t U e n o H o u s e / Ya m a g u c h i
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" field studies " eiji watanabe emmanuelle waeckerle salim currimjee
essorgallery
gallery 1
LONDON
2002
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" Ar t in the Home " in Edinburgh C a n d y Fa c t o r y Pa u l C a r t e r Kate Gray Lyn Lowenstein Billy McNab O l a Pe h r s o n Shimabuku Yo s h i y u k i S h i r a k a w a E i j i Wa t a n a b e
2002
Organised in Edinburgh by City Art Centre Collective Galler y Edinburgh College of Ar t
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I n s t a l l a t i o n v i ew a t f l a t / Randolph Cresscent Edinburgh
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" Ar t in the Home " in Edinburgh
2002
Installation view at Hegel House(Richard Mur phy Architects) 1 7 R o y a l Te r r a c e M e w s
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Aichi Triennale 2010 Aichi Arts Center
A t t h e c o u r t o f M i s o no junior school
23 Aug. 2010
i n s t a l l a t i o n v i e w a t T o yohashi City Art Museum
2012