Exhibition Dates
April 7 – April 28, 2007
  1. Cosmic Chant 1 - Mushiki Whale - Cosmic Egg, 2007 - Plastic beads and brass wire, 3x8x3 ft.
  2. Cosmic Chant 2 - Mushiki Whale - Cosmic Egg, 2007 - Plastic beads and brass wire, 3x8x3 ft.
  3. Cosmic Chant 3
  4. Cosmic Chant 4
  5. Cosmic Chant 5 - Mushiki Whale - Detail



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Cosmic Chant

Mushiki Whale, the Form­less Whale, float­ing and drift­ing between the sea and the sky, is called Cos­mic Egg. It con­sists of all Empti­ness with­out any emo­tion or desire, but sings a Cos­mic Chant. With its Breath it cre­ated the uni­verse by blow­ing out num­ber­less crys­tals. – NATSU

Mushiki Whale by Natsu

Onishi Gallery is pleased to present a new series of work by NATSU. This exhi­bi­tion is NATSU’s sec­ond show with the Gallery, in which she con­tin­ues to explore her fas­ci­na­tion with trans­parency, crafts­man­ship and the spir­i­tual rela­tion­ship between human and uni­verse. The artist cre­ates an over­sized oval sculp­ture that resem­bles a whale, which is made of thou­sands of trans­par­ent plas­tic beads. The sus­pended Mushiki Whale – Cos­mic Egg is installed to hang from the ceil­ing to the floor in the gallery, to artic­u­late NATSU’s human­is­tic chant­ing that flows and links the space in between heaven and earth.

Mushiki Whale – Cos­mic Egg deliv­ers the idea of the begin­ning of the uni­verse. NATSU believes that before every human being arrives in the world, he/she expe­ri­ences the Cos­mic Chant while in the womb. As time goes by, the rhythm of the Cos­mic Chant still remains, but some­how it merely becomes more dif­fi­cult for the grownups to be aware of it. Other noises such as emo­tions or desires obstruct and dis­tract us from sens­ing the call from the ori­gin of the uni­verse, a voice from within. In search of this lost state, NASTU attempts to remind peo­ple of the begin­ning of the uni­verse and to resume one’s pure mind to sense the Cos­mic Chant through her work.

Ref­er­enc­ing the tra­di­tional Japan­ese philo­soph­i­cal notion ‘triple world’, NATSU con­structs her work on the basis that our world is divided into three realms—the world of desire (yoku-kai), the world of form (shiki-kai), and the world of the form­less (mushiki-kai). Through the metic­u­lous process of inter­twin­ing numer­ous strings of beads into a Mushiki Whale, NASTU instills her spir­i­tual pur­suit into the repet­i­tive craft-making action and hence tran­scends the whale to a form­less, trans­par­ent Cos­mic Egg freely float­ing between heaven and earth, the phys­i­cal and the ethe­real, and the nat­ural and the artificial.

The new exhi­bi­tion at Onishi Gallery will be on view from 7 April through 28 April 2007. Gallery hours are Tues­day through Sat­ur­day, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.

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