toshiaki tomita

Could you come or not come to our hometown?

installation with photographs, texts, sand drawing on floor.　"Contemporary East Asian Letter Art" Seoul Arts Centre, Calligraphy Hall, Seoul, South Korea. 1999.

Employing stencil technique from graffiti, I copied the message “Could you come or not come to our hometown?” on several beaches near my hometown and western coast of South Korea where the group show “Contemporary East Asian Letter Art” was taken place. I also stenciled the same massage on the exhibition floor combined with photographed images of the same beaches. I stenciled them all, not with spray, but with sand, and I swapped them from here and there, so the text on the exhibition floor was done by the sand from my hometown.
The relocation of the sand reflects the meaning of the text, and the locations of the stencil derived from where I got this message; the beach where I was given the message by Zhibin, the boy of a village in China. Non of the art works gathered together in the exhibition space from three genres (design, calligraphy and fine arts) and three main countries (South Korea, China and Japan) were upside down but mine. My text was originally written in such way by the boy and it was upside down to me. That means it was written by the other to me, and it already show there are two persons having conversation intimately. I wanted to share this question/invitation from the boy, with audience in a same manner.
The Chinese character originally was born in Bronze Age China as Oracle bone script used by limited priests secretly to communicate with gods. Then kings and authorities occupied it and cut it into rocks representing the power, until it came down to people. During these times its types and styles had been changing, and finally personal handwriting considered as individuality like today.
Now here in Could you come or not come to our hometown?, it does not even belong to individuality but in between, heading from the one to the other, yet it is not delivered because it is still upside down, even it is not my handwriting but by the boy's lefty hand, and unlike kings engravings it is ephemeral like sand stencil on the beaches where the waves washing it away, or on the exhibtion floor as the audience kicking and scattering it.