Takahiro Iwasaki: Reflection Model at the NGV

TAKAHIRO Iwasaki’s model of the Shinto temple at Itsukushima in Japan, a commission from the NGV, is his most ambitious so far.

Installation view of Takahiro Iwasaki’s Reflection Model (Itsukushima). Picture: Brooke Holme

THE religious life of most people is a composite of overlaid and inter­woven traditions, sometimes quite disparate in origin; this is true notwithstanding the common tendency of humans to persuade themselves that their own particular system is a special, superior and definitive dispensation expressly granted to them by a supernatural mandate long ago, far away and in circumstances conveniently free of witnesses.

The religion of ancient Greece probably came together from the merging of the mostly male gods of the nomadic Indo-European invaders with the goddesses that already reigned among the settled agrarian pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Greek peninsula. One can see the work of assimilation in the way that goddesses become the mothers, wives or daughters of gods, depending on their place in the final hier­archy: thus Metis — assimilated by Zeus into his own nature — is substantially replaced as an independent deity by Athena, her daughter by Zeus.

Artemis too, sister of Apollo and again daughter of Zeus, essentially replaced the earlier and more primitive goddess Hecate but could not quite reduce her, like Metis, to the status of a personification. Hecate’s hold on the popular imagination was too strong, as we can see in the way that Hesiod speaks of her in the Theogony, and she survived as a goddess of witchcraft, invoked for her dark powers from Euripides’s Medea to the famous scene in Macbeth.

Greek religion thus developed as a composite of male and female manifestations of the divine, and its followers could not imagine God as the exclusively male divinity first conceived by the Jews and later followed by the Muslims. When a sect of Jews became convinced that Jesus Christ was the long-awaited Messiah and set about converting their Greek, Hellenised Near Eastern or Roman neighbours, these people longed for a feminine face to the new belief: the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos — the bearer of God — was at hand to be a de facto goddess, as she has always remained in the Catholic Church.

Hinduism has been through similar developments, and once again the male gods of the Indo-Europeans presumably encountered indigenous goddesses with whom they had to come to terms. In the mature form of Hindu belief, each of the principal male gods of the Hindu trinity has a female consort who is considered as embodying a vital part of his power: Saraswati with Brahma, Lakshmi with Vishnu and Parvati with Shiva. Buddhism, not originally a religion at all but a kind of wisdom teaching, reabsorbed the multiple divinities of the Hindu tradition and even, in versions such as Tantric Buddhism, adapted the motif of sexual ecstasy as an analog of religious experience.

Elsewhere in Buddhist religious art, what is striking is an ambiguity of gender in images of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas that ranges from asexuality to androgyny. The most famous of the Bodhisattvas, Avalokiteshvara, originally male, metamorphoses into a goddess in China (Kuanyin) and Japan (Kannon).

Buddhism became very important in China for a time but long ago declined, leaving the earlier local beliefs to predominate.

But these beliefs themselves are completely disparate in origin and in nature: Confucianism is essentially an ethical and social doctrine, named for the great sage whose teachings are collected in the Analects, but himself resuming doctrines of centuries past.

Taoism, on the other hand, based on the teachings of Confucius’s near-contemporary Lao Tzu, has its roots in more primitive animistic beliefs about the life of nature, but raises these to something like a pantheistic understanding of a divine presence immanent in nature and expressed in the ch’i or breath of life common to the human body and the natural world. Whereas Confucianism enjoins the correct performance of ethical duties, Taoism teaches that non-action, or the abstention from wilful action, can lead to greater attunement to the world.

If this makes us think of some elements of Zen Buddhism, it is because Zen comes from Chan, a Chinese variant of Buddhism deeply influenced by the spirit of Taoism. The influence of Zen Buddhism is pervasive in Japanese culture, but it is not the only form that is practised, for the Pure Land doctrine of Amidism also appeals to followers attracted by its promise of life in paradise after death.

And Buddhism itself, in all its forms, is overlaid on the earlier animistic beliefs of Shinto, so that the composite nature of religious experience is nowhere more obvious than in Japan, where certain parts of life are governed by one system and certain parts by the other. It is often said, for example, that every Japanese is married in Shinto and buried in Buddhism.

Many beliefs attached to the sacred role of the emperor are associated with Shinto, as the most truly native religion of the archipelago, and the temple at Itsukushima, the subject of a newly commissioned work by Takahiro Iwasaki at the National Gallery of Victoria, is a case in point.

Itsukushima is an island, often simply known as Miyajima — the island of the shrine — in Japan’s Inland Sea. The island itself is sacred, so that originally it remained uninhabited, and even today no one is supposed to be born or die there.

Those about to give birth or about to die are taken to the mainland. The same practice was once observed on the sacred island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.

It was this status as a holy place that led to the most extraordinary quality of the temple that was originally built there in the sixth century and was subsequently reconstructed, in the form we see today, 500 years ago.

It was built on piers driven into a shallow bay, so that pilgrims, approaching by water, could alight and visit the shrine without setting foot on the island itself.

The result is an extraordinary spectacle: an extensive temple complex in timber that seems to float weightlessly on the surface of the water. A magnificent torii gate — one of the most characteristic structures of Japanese architecture — stands farther out in the bay, its feet exposed at low tide but allowing pilgrims, at high tide, to row through its ceremonial portal on their way to visit the temple.

Iwasaki, who had already made wooden models of a couple of Japanese temples in the past few years, produced this one, his most ambitious so far, as a commission from the NGV funded by the Felton Bequest.

It hangs in its own room, surrounded by the kind of space needed to appreciate the illusion of seeing the temple from a distance and to re-create the space between the torii gate and the main structure.

The particularity of his model is that it reproduces the illusion of the temple doubled by its own reflection in the still water.

Here there is no water, but the temple and its mirror image are constructed as a single continuous object, which is suspended in space, the horizon-line — equivalent to the water-level — slightly lower than average eye, thus matching the approximate effect that we would witness if really visiting the island by boat.

Walking around the suspended temple, which itself is roughly but not exactly symmetrical on either side of the central landing wharf, we note that the reflection effect is not purely optical but is, as it were, metaphysical, for every detail of the interiors and ceilings inside the temple structure is reproduced in the lower, inverted section.

It is as though the doubling hinted at in the optical phenomenon of reflection were only a metaphor for some deeper and more mysterious relation between doubles in alternative or parallel currents of time or space.

This sense of contemplating something that cannot literally be seen or even exist in a conventionally rational mode is enhanced by the physical nature of the installation. Suspension itself evokes an effect of stillness, and the material of which the model is made, light but strong Japanese cypress wood, contributes to the illusion of weightlessness.

Vivid in the precision of its detail yet almost disembodied, the model is akin to a mirage, a dream or a memory. The delicacy and precision of the workmanship imbue it with a sense of the intimacy of craftsmanship, which was lost in the industrial scale of production I commented on in the case of Zhang Huan’s Sydney Buddha installation.

This is a work that impresses by its scale — at once big in itself and a miniature model of a vast structure — yet draws the viewer in by its complexity.

The refinement and precision of the workmanship in every detail invites close inspection and the seemingly endless repetition of architectural motifs, as you walk around the hanging wooden model, naturally induces a meditative silence.

Silence, indeed, reigns in the room itself, but on the day I was there it was drowned out by the racket of a band playing popular covers of past decades downstairs, in yet another populist attempt to boost visitor numbers to the institution. It was a striking example of an almost brutal lack of respect for the environment of a gallery whose core audience comes in search of something other than the soundscape of a shopping mall.

But, after all, how surprising is a rock band when the main exhibition was a fashion show which, as the gallery has boasted, attracted almost 227,000 visitors?

Although these attendances have nothing to do with art, Victoria now has a Minister for Creative Industries, in whose eyes, predictably enough, the exhibition was an “example of Victoria’s creative leadership”.

As I observed at the end of last year, three of our big state galleries were betting on frocks to drag in attendances across the summer and this populist trend seems likely to continue as museums do their best to pretend that high art and consumer kitsch are essentially the same thing, for the simple reason that the latter category represents a bigger market segment.

Even an ostensibly experimental art venue such as Sydney’s Carriageworks is going to present the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in April.

Then there was the interesting case of the trade in moral credits announced in a press release recently, when the Museum of Contemporary Art accepted funding from the Crown Resorts Foundation for a program to support artists working in western Sydney. Crown is a gambling business.

But Crown gains moral credit for giving money to culture, and the MCA can implicitly justify taking this cash on the grounds that it is serving multicultural communities assumed to be thirsting for aesthetic enlightenment.

Takahiro Iwasaki: Reflection Model (Itsukushima)

NGV International, Melbourne, until April 6.