T.T founder Taiga Takahashi built his work around a philosophy he called "Applied Archaeology." Over the years, the exhibitions that T.T has put together have been experimental spaces where this way of thinking was carried into physical form. What follows is an archive of those exhibitions.
Taiga Takahashi Solo Exhibition | THE IN ABSENCE OF PRESENCE
Ryosokuin
Kenninji Subtemple, Kyoto
December 3–11, 2022
On September 4, 2022, Taiga Takahashi, both the designer of T.T and a contemporary artist, died at the age of 27. He was an artist who widened his range of expression from the making of clothing into fine art, space, and architecture. He named his own practice "Applied Archaeology," guided by the idea of reviving relics of the past and excavating the artifacts of the future, and he kept exploring the beauty held within the passage of time, nature, chance, and imperfection.
This exhibition was his first solo show, and the opening chapter of an ongoing project to carry his philosophy and his eye forward into the future.
The venue, Ryosokuin, is a subtemple of the Kenninji temple. Founded in 1358, the temple holds a strolling garden with a pond designed by Jyochi Chikushin (1678–1745), the fifth-generation grand master of the Yabunouchi tea school. The garden is also designated as a scenic site of Kyoto Prefecture. The exhibition used the area around this garden, the "Hojo no Ma" room where the principal image is enshrined, and the "Daishoin" room on the north side.
A single piece of cloth, the starting point
It all began with an encounter with a relic from the Taishakuten statue once enshrined at Akishinodera in Nara, a temple founded in 776. What Takahashi acquired was a fragment of robe from the standing statue attributed to Kudatsu Bosatsu (729–749). The fragment had once belonged to the collector Muryotei Torasaburo, and later passed to the antiques dealer Yozo Kawase. Deeply drawn to the drapery of cloth carved into Buddhist statues, Takahashi slowly widened his thinking toward how drapery itself is expressed in both Eastern and Western sculpture.
"The wall of fabric draped over the human body undulates. What is there is a world where reality and illusion, realism and abstraction, coexist." Ancient Greek sculpture, Michelangelo in the Renaissance, and Japanese Buddhist statues: long before the idea of "fine art" existed, works from different eras and lands had already used drapery as a shared language to bring beauty into being. Takahashi recognized this as something universal.
Hojo no Ma: gathered drapery folds and fragments of wood
In the Hojo no Ma, where the principal image is enshrined, Takahashi placed together the clothing folds of Buddhist statues from Akishinodera and Taimadera (founded in 612) that he had collected himself, fragments of wooden architecture, and words he had left behind. Not the Buddhist statues themselves, but fragments of robes that had fallen away from them, and broken pieces of pillars. These were things worn down by time and stripped of their original meaning. They were placed neither as artworks nor as research materials, but as clues that let visitors trace the path of Takahashi's thinking.
Daishoin: sculptures born from drapery
In the Daishoin room on the north side, the show presented sculptures by Takahashi inspired by the drapery of cloth depicted in sculpture and painting across all times and places. Ancient Greek sculpture, Michelangelo, and Buddhist statues: the drapery shared by works from different times and spaces was translated into three-dimensional form by his own hands. The space between realism and abstraction drawn by the folds of cloth, and undulations that rose like walls, lined up across the tatami mats of the Shoin.
Presence by way of absence
Fragments of Buddhist statue robes, building materials from the temple, sculptures of drapery: everything gathered for this exhibition had lost its main body, or had been separated from it. For that very reason, the absence of the maker rose up all the more strongly. "Only things of value cross time, together with the thoughts of those who created them, and continue to live into the future." Just as his own words suggest, the exhibition became an attempt to present the presence that rises through absence, using the temple space itself.
