On its road to post-war recovery, Japan became the home of synonyms of the automotive industry: Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Suzuki. Even as these companies humbled steel and aluminium and built Japan’s formidable economy, they excavated the earth and polluted the skies. At Akara Contemporary in Mumbai, artist Keita Miyazaki’s works look at the aftermath of this high-octane growth, particularly at the destruction and the ecocide this continuous extraction has caused.

Miyazaki takes old, rusty and abandoned car parts, remoulds them in the shape of branches and bouquets and crowns them with polychromous paper flowers. With chrome, cast bronze and card paper, he creates a different kind of Miyawaki forest (an urban afforestation technique) for Blooming at the End of the World (till April 20). With 11 works, the show begins with Circular Facts (2024) and Structural Movement (2024), two table centrepieces. Flowers form pleated tiers and bowl cuts, hung on complicated metal plumbing. The choice of colours—dusky saffron and signal red, aurora purple and henna green—stands out starkly against the sooty junk, like bougainvillaea amid ruins.

With a PhD in craft metal casting from Tokyo University of the Arts and prior experience in welding, Miyazaki’s expertise with alloys is a given. But, it’s his felicity and neatness with paper (the colour separation is reminiscent of the feathers of a macaw), which comes as a pleasant surprise. A self-taught origamist, Miyazaki uses up to 30 layers of heavy GSM Japanese paper to create honeycomb replicas.

It is often impossible to divorce a person from their environment and Miyazaki’s works, for all their grungy beauty, are a direct response to Japan’s recent history. Prone to seismic rumbles, the island nation has always been an active site for earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) also captured these vulnerabilities. So, the 2011 triple disasters of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown were bound to leave their radioactive imprint on artists. Post-Fukushima art has now become part of the trade jargon for the resultant output.

For Miyazaki, it was the visuals of the refuse and stranded objects after the apocalyptic event that lingered. While pursuing his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (2011-13) in London, he began incorporating car parts into his practice, reassembling them with botanical elements, since “dystopia and regeneration are central themes of (his) work”¹. For exhibitions in other parts of the world, his pieces were fabricated out of exhaust pipes and mufflers in different shapes and sizes. They resembled pipe organs in Excess of Desire (2021); or a cluster of white sakuras (White Territory); or totems, interjected with tutus in Duality (2021).

At Akara Contemporary, three of his works—Chronicle, Twin Territories, and Woodland —are mounted on the walls at a Samurai-sword distance. Chronicle (2024), with a metal base and a floral top, looks like Terminator dressed in a neck ruff. Twin Territories (2024) is retrofitted with a pair of BMW-7 lungs and discoloured scrap, in which the flower handles jut out like Wolverine claws. Woodland (2024)would be at home in Tim Burton’s wonderland. A steampunk contraption with ruched sleeves and fluted collars, Woodland is an oxidised wreckage with a candyfloss soul. As if the Industrial Revolution was reset with hippies in charge.

The most zen work is the pastel-ly Bipolar Reality (2023). Crafted like a fountain and its reflection, the northern half is minty green and mild yellow, while the southern half is lilac and peach. A larger version of this is Vertical Blue, (2024)in which a sapphire delphinium looks more like a samba headdress. The work borrows from the Aegean shade card, which is offset on a silvery tuba. The only departure in the show is Consistent System, an all-metal sculpture, with an upgraded turret made of cast brass. With an inscrutable joinery of hinges and screws at the base, it could pass off as a small milling machine.  

The final two works, Favorite Moment (2024) and Milestone (2024 )are the ones in which the binary abstractions of life and death get a full hearing. Even as the bones are decayed, the florets sprout like carousel tents and onion domes. The spare parts contort and the colours burst. At 6 feet-plus, Milestone is the most like a tree, a sentinel, digging its roots in, defiantly letting flowers burst through concrete. In the 2003 film, The Last Samurai, there’s a poetic dialogue between Ken Watanabe and Tom Cruise, in which Watanabe is showing Cruise the ways of the Samurai: “The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.” The show and its bionic boscage are a confirmation of that beautiful sentiment.

‘Blooming at the End of the World’ is on view at Akara Contemporary, from March 14–April 27, 2024. 

References

^1.From Bronze Age to Brexit: The Dystopian Dreams of Keita Miyazaki by Josephine Rout, (former) curator, V&A