A similarly startling juxtaposition of image and context occurred in June 2006, when Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi built a temporary woman's boudoir to enclose an existing equestrian statue of L'artificer on the roof of the ten-story Maison Hermès flagship store in Japan. Located on a heavily trafficked crossing in Tokyo, the glass-clad architecture of Hermès Japon, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, has been a landmark and major attraction of the Ginza district since it opened in 2001.
Nishi's boudoir not only caught the attention of the many passers-by in this busy Ginza shopping quarter, but also of those who follow the arts. As the equestrian statue L'artificer - a symbol of Maison Hermès - is surrounded by a blue polypropylene structure, those viewing it from street level will only recognise that something out of the ordinary is happening above. Venturing inside the building, all one needs do to gain a closer glimpse of Nishi's revelation is travel via elevator to the eighth floor of the building and walk up two levels using an emergency staircase to the open-air tenth floor. Further on, the steel pipe scaffolding will usher visitors to carefully climb the narrow stairs one at a time. Those who make it this far will place their shoes at the entrance and proceed into the typically Japanese small, flat-white interior boudoir. Among the plain white interior items, including a reading desk and cabinet, visitors are faced with L'artificer, Hermès scarves in his hands, standing and occupying the entire bed. The image is at once surreal and amusingly sarcastic.
The house of Hermès is known for its close association with contemporary artists outside the fashion industry, including interior and graphic design, fine arts, music and other performing arts. As such, Hermès Japon has been attached to the contemporary art scene from its inception, creating a gallery space on two floors to stage art exhibitions. When the managers began to renovate and expand the store facilities, the gallery remained opened (Hermès Japon is scheduled to re-open at the end of October 2006 with newly renovated and expanded facilities).
In fact, the creative Hermès management team boldly made the construction process part of an exhibit, inviting Nishi to participate. Nishi seems an apt choice; he is now known for provoking fresh responses from viewers by installing temporary structures around familiar public and iconic symbols - images that are loaded with accumulated meaning, such as the equestrian statue at Hermès Japon.
Born in 1960, in Japan's Nagoya prefecture, Nishi studied fine art at the Munster Academy of Arts and since then has been based in Germany. In 2002, Nishi constructed a temporary one-room apartment atop the historical 14th-century cathedral in Basel, enclosing a bronze angel set as a weather vane on the rooftop. Attracted by the strangeness of the image, many viewers laboriously climbed the cathedral stairs and the scaffolding to reach Nishi's creation, built nearly 40 metres above ground level. Within the apartment, they discovered the angel placed on a living room table, seemingly destined to be there. As if time travelling from the ancient cathedral to a contemporary living room, the angel had moved from a historical public setting to an intimate private domain.
With its flight, viewers were confronted with questions of what defines normality and what can truly be considered unusual in a world of shifting perspectives. In the same year, Nishi enclosed a 4.5-metre high monument of Queen Victoria, located at Derby Square in Liverpool, in a temporary hotel room. Visitors to the site could book an overnight stay at the hotel and be a guest of Queen Victoria herself.
Before beginning to work on his project at Hermès Japon, Nishi embarked on a one-year dialogue with the Hermès creative team. Representatives of the house embraced his idea of covering the equestrian statue and locating it within the displaced context of the private bedroom of a fictional female figure, Chéri. Explaining his inspiration, Nishi said, 'I wanted to play around with the public's perception of the Hermès brand. [The image conjured by owning] Hermès is something many Japanese women yearn for. Many women possess a dream of Prince Charming riding on a horse to appear someday in front of [them]. So I wanted to use this publicly accepted image of Hermès and overlap it with the equestrian statue as Prince Charming. I tried to project Japanese women's adoration of Hermès over the Hermès equestrian statue at the rooftop of the building.'
Clearly, Hermès and Nishi are themselves a dynamic combination; on the one hand, the maker of taste, on the other, an artist capable of shaking up firmly held, even if unconscious, notions. Those daring enough to have their most cherished ideals put through a willfully subversive lens may find a trip to Hermès Japon a good starting point.
Kanae Hasegawa
