Autumn (Tokyo Studio)

Many national musuems and galleries extend their opening hours to 20:00 on Fridays. This allows working people a chance to catch up on some culture and knowledge at their leisure. We also made use of the opportunity to visit the exhibits we did not manage to see on our last visit to National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno. On the second floor we encountered an ultra-modern cabinet of curiosity (a full size room of 20 meters x 20 metres) displaying the 7 kindgoms of living things according to the modern classification system.

Musuem asethetics always have a certain appeal, although some may argue that these new cabinets of curiosity are just too clean and soul-less, or perhaps simply lack the charm of their 17th century counterparts. The obsessiveness of ordering and putting everything in the right place certainly goes deep somewhere in the human psyche (afterall isn’t this the dream that makes Ikea so successful?).

Being a fan of dymotape and one who orders her spice jars in terms of types (seeds, leaves, roots, or powdered…?) and arranges the laundry according to sizes and colours, categorisations of most kinds fascinate me. However, the real joy lies in the search for relationship bewteen things and working out the key, and the limits of these systems. I would like to see (or perhaps make) a cabinet where the relationships can be challenged or even modified at will.