“Surface and Custom”

The duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda often address within their praxis the image of the artist as well as the artist’s institutionalized mythologization. For their slide-projection work Moulting, 2019, first exhibited at their Kölnischer Kunstverein retrospective this year, they reproduced advertising, product designs, and window displays from the archive of the Shiseido Group to reconstruct the interwoven relationship between early-twentieth-century European and Japanese avant-gardes and their influence on the company’s commercial aesthetic, dating from the 1923 Kantô earthquake to the 1950s. Moulting functions both as the hook and opening beat for “Surface and Custom,” an anniversary exhibition celebrating one hundred years of programming at Shiseido’s sleek Ginza space, which represents the progressive sociocultural engagement of the beauty-products manufacturer while also providing it with a market advantage.

Chung and Maeda’s selection and supplementation of five artistic positions from their milieu are neither pompous nor overloaded. Rather, distributed throughout the basement level of the exhibition space, the purposeful arrangement comes across as imminently reserved. All of the selected works reflect on the value of the surface, and how such value is culturally inscribed and translated. The pristinely flowing image sequences in Carissa Rodriguez’s video The Maid, 2018, display Sherrie Levine’s “Newborns” series in various institutional and domestic interiors. Just as Levine appropriates and adapts works by Constantin Brancusi, Rodriguez’s video zooms in on the reproduction and circulation of artistic work, histories, and hierarchies.

Meanwhile, Klara Lidén imagines furniture for the precariat with her Lightboxes, 2019, cobbled together out of cardboard boxes that have been barricaded, parked, weighted, and seated, thus introducing stumbling blocks from the street into the white cube. Chung and Maeda’s interest in the skin of things and its materiality as social construction elegantly strips the anniversary exhibition of cultural essentialization, while putting “cosmetics” as much on display as in question.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.