Rei Naito
Using organic and found materials and creating immersive environments that interact with sound, light, and atmosphere, Naito's practice takes a strong interest in the intimate, ambient, and often transient encounters that arise between individuals and artworks.
[1][2] Naito is also known for her collaboration with architect Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA on the Teshima Art Museum, where her work Matrix, the single artwork on display, utilizes organic forms to accentuate the porosity between phases of the natural world.
[5] An expansion of her graduation project at Musashino Art University, Apocalypse Palace serves as an early illustration of Naito's interest in immersive environments, spirituality, and the centrality of individual experience in the artistic encounter.
A litany of handmade objects crafted out of paper, thread, beads, wire, plastic wrap, and other miscellaneous materials was neatly arranged upon the table, and lamps lined the perimeter of the room, imparting a luminous white glow to the space.
Naito's impulse was to "create a spiritual place of her own," using light, form, and everyday materials to construct an extensive altar-like assemblage that evoked intimacy through its scale while alluding to the vibrant ecosystem of a city, held together by transitory, fragile parts.
[13] Naito stripped the house of its former furnishings, took down the walls separating the five rooms to create a single cohesive space, covered the windows, and removed the impluvium and flooring to expose the structure to the elements and unearth the original ground of the building.
"[15] In 2004, architect Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA began working on a design for a new museum in the Seto Inland Sea as part of the Benesse corporation's ongoing development of art projects in the region.
[16] A series of consultations and research on climactic conditions and seasonal shifts proceeded between the two, and the final work Bokei [Matrix] was executed with a waterdrop-shaped form with two circular oculi, sited along a hillside overlooking terraced rice fields.
[8]: 279 Visitors are required to enter the space barefoot, and the water-repellent floor has been similarly calibrated to create diverse types of movements and interactions among the water droplets.
[4]: 173 Working primarily with wood, Naito creates small, anonymized figures that recall other typologies of figurines and statues used in intimate settings, such as jizō, kokeshi, and dogū.
Through deliberate choice of small scale sculptures and found materials, Naito meditates on the fragility of human presence, and resilience of hope in events of catastrophe.
[20] Combining watery swaths of pigment, a light touch, and a generous use of negative space, Naito's atmospheric compositions echo the delicate tenor of her sculptural works, and exhibit a familiar sensitivitity towards the tension between presence and absence in form and matter.
