Wall-Sized Jigsaw Puzzles and 800-Page Park Maps Emerge at a New Group Show in London

April 22, 2015, 9:25am

Chim↑Pom It’s the Wall World (detail), 2014 Installation view (detail): Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh 2014 Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Bangladesh, 2014 © Chim↑Pom Courtesy of the artist and MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

As part of group show by the mountain path, Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom will appear at the White Rainbow gallery in London next week. Previous work by the group, whose official ranks include Ellie, Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Masataka Okada, Toshinori Mizuno, and Motomu Inaoka, has seen them turn real rats into taxidermied Pikachus. Another work of theirs, Paradox of Downtown, references the technique of action painting practiced by Jackson Pollack, but uses Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to apply the paint.

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For the exhibition, they’ll be presenting It’s the Wall World, a continuing installation that consists of a video and a jigsaw puzzle on the gallery wall. The work is ongoing because pieces for the puzzle are still being collected from walls all around the world—Bangladesh, Japan, and now the UK—with a chance-driven image emerging as the jigsaw is built up.

The jigsaw acts as a unifying emblem, crossing borders both physical and social. The pic below, from their Instagram page, shows them collecting pieces in Tokyo.

高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON ⇆高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON⇆高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON ⇆高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON⇆高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON ⇆高円寺 KOENJI ⇆ 東京 TOKYO ⇆ ロンドン LONDON⇆

A video posted by Chim↑Pom (@chimpomhappy) on Apr 19, 2015 at 1:00pm PDT

Also at the show will be Hidemi Nishida‘s piece, scan_01_5.jul.2014_fin. At 20 meters long it consists of around 800 pages of A4 paper, printed with 1:1 scale scans of one of the oldest railways in Japan, which is no longer in use. It’s known as the Temiya Line, was used to transport coal, and was a major transport link for industrial development. Today, however, it’s a walking path.

Nishida spent a whole day with a a battery pack on his back covering 50 square meters for the work, turning the images into an archive of the place, while hinting at its former glory. “It could be said as a digital frottage containing the details of the memory,” Nishida explains.

scan_01_5.jul.2014_fin at the Sapporo International Art Festival 2014. Photo via

by the mountain path is at White Rainbow gallery, 47 Mortimer Street, London, W1W 8HJ, from April 29 to June 20, 2015

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Tagged:
Art, ChimPom, contemporary art, Creators, exhibitions, japanese art, Jigsaw, Jigsaw puzzles, Paper, Scans, White Rainbow

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