'Samsara' installation reflects the imperfection and impermanence of life
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Artist Fumino Hora with small, doll-like glass figures inspired by Jizo, a popular Japanese "Bodhisattva" who assists travelers and saves children who die young or before birth. A Bodhisattva is a being who has reached enlightenment but has renounced Nirvana to help others. -
A detail of Fumino Hora's installation, "The Way of Samsara," at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. Organza banners imprinted with the image of a woman in a white kimono draw visitors into the gallery. -
Fumino Hora's "The Way of Samsara" includes a cast glass face and arms, two of which cradle a feather. The title, "Sen-ju: The one who can hear all cries of the world," refers to its inspiration, Sen-ju, a Bodhisattva or being who selflessly delays Nirvana to help others.
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Fumino Hora's exhibition at the Pittsburgh Glass Center is exotic yet accessible, spare yet brimming with objects, inspired by imperfection but perfect.
"The Way of Samsara" is an installation but comprises individual artworks that arise from aspects of Buddhism and from Ms. Hora's life experiences. As such it blends Japanese and global cultural constructs, self-portraiture and generically human concerns.
Samsara, Ms. Hora explains, is "a belief that all earthly beings are trapped in a perpetual cycle of birth, death and rebirth. And one can only escape from it by attaining the elusive spiritual state of Nirvana."
In the entry, six fragmented, cast-paper torsos hanging from the ceiling are visceral and call to mind imagery ranging from butcher shop carcasses to the dangling figures of Goya's gut-wrenching "Disasters of War."
That there are six is a reference to the "six realms of existence" or "six paths of reincarnation" that one may be reborn into. They are Deva (like a god), warrior, human, animal, hungry ghost, and Hell, and are determined by the Karma accumulated during one's present life.
In contrast, two light-filled, translucent glass figures, of a mature woman and a little girl, appear to add sweetness. But do they?
Ms. Hora has dubbed the woman, who is pregnant, Rosemary, an allusion to the 1968 movie "Rosemary's Baby." "She's carrying something. I don't say what."
The child is Ms. Hora's "signature figure," which takes the form of a Japanese doll wearing the traditional Chinese dress, a cheongsam. The artist, who was born in Tokyo, worked in Hong Kong from 1994 to 2006, a Japanese national living in a Chinese culture. The tension she felt under such circumstances also exists within the figure, projected by its stance: slightly sideways, slightly forward leaning.
"It is a subtle self-portrait as well," Ms. Hora says.
First Published January 12, 2011 12:00 am
