Lot 387: KENJI YANOBE

KENJI YANOBE B.1965 TORAYAN NO. 4 signed in Japanese, dated 2004 and marked No. 4 mixed media 96(h) by 45 by 33 cm.; 37 3/4 by 17 3/4 by 13 in.

This work is unique.



Building tirelessly for his singular vision of a future where only custom-made machinery will provide safety on earth, Kenji Yanobe never fails to surprise. All of his sculptures are magnificent feats of engineering, and driving the intricate designs are astonishingly simple principles—basic human needs and an innate Darwinian desire to survive. A formidable stream of imagination irrigates his entire oeuvre—yet when one investigates the source of such ingenuity, one finds an ordinary teenager who simmered in the same pot as all the other children of his generation, one that is rife with popular subculture and science fiction. Well aware of the modern history of atomic disasters, its proven and potential perils, Kenji Yanobe laces his creations with an appropriate fear and reveals through them an instinctive hope to avoid danger.



Kenji Yanobe grew up in the vicinity of an abandoned site previously the venue for Expo 1970 Osaka. Rubble and detritus populated the stretch of wasteland, left behind from the initially glorious pavilions housing predicted visions of future and bizarre scientific presentations. Sceneries of a future-past filled the mind of this young child and instilled in him a lifelong appreciation for the technological avant-garde. The impulse to build, to construct and to invent has fuelled the artist's persistent quest for his own brand of delusion. Costume-making formed the foundation of his creative journey. Very early on, he found ease in realizing in tangible form his ideas and concepts in equipping his body with another layer of protective, even functional, skin. Poured into the configuration of each suit is his personal repository of childhood memories, subcultural implants and expectations of a deteriorating, hazardous future.



Torayan is an abbreviated nomenclature of Naniwa no Torayan, who is a half-child, half-man dummy used by Kenji Yanobe's ventriloquist father. The doll bears an adorable face with round eyes and curly eyelashes but with a short moustache and a head lacking in hair, thus resorting to a combover style. The yellow outfit in which he is clad is the result of a gradual evolution of suits that first begun with Kenji Yanobe's Yellow Suit, a work conceived back in 1994 as a reaction to the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Fukui Prefecture in Japan. This first generational suit was bright yellow and was already equipped with a Geiger counter, a device that detects radiation and flashes and enumerates the radioactive rays that permeate the human body. and. Then came the Atom Suit, which is not only a suit but an entire performance project where the artist travels to Berlin, Germany, and walks through the site of the Chernobyl Disaster, where a local nuclear power plant suffered an accident in 1986 and is still emitting radioactive rays to this day. This suit modifies upon the previous with its flexibility, lightness, waterproof quality, installation of counters covering all the sensitive areas and the two horns reminiscent of Atom Boy, comic artist Tezuka Osamu's most well-known half-boy, half-robot character. Yellow, as a colour, is repeatedly used by the artist and has become something of a trademark colour—Kenji Yanobe first applied the colour primarily for its visual association with the notion of warning and subsequently, because it is also the colour of a canary, which were taken to the mines and served as an alarm that alerted the workers when the gasses reached threatening levels. What Torayan wears is the Mini Atom Suit—a miniature version of Atom Suit sized for a three-year-old child, his own and Bakudan, the German child he met at Chernobyl. Torayan was conceived as part of the Cinema in the Woods project, a wooden movie theater exclusively for children that played "The World of Torayan", an educational film where the artist's father taught ventriloquist techniques during the war and that demonstrates ways to protect oneself against nuclear threats.



The fixation on futurist revelations of personalized technology built to withstand the hazards of atomic warfare is clear. However, fused with a serious meditation on the dangers the future holds is an innocence that Kenji Yanobe's sculptures manage to retain. The child is king and rules the world he manufactures. The artist is perhaps still that same child infinitely fascinated by stories that tell of space, robots or heroes deploying gadgets and rescuing others. Making assemblages that can be described as extreme statements on the imminent direction of civilization, Kenji Yanobe forces his audience to re-evaluate the true virtues of scientific development.

Kenji Yanobe has made eight similar Torayan's but not in editions. Though similar, they are not exactly the same. The artist previously decided to sell five pieces and thus numbered them No.1 through No.5. Instead of being an editioning scheme, the numbers are assigned for purposes of distinction.