Visitors to Akira Yamaguchi’s recent show might not have noticed at first that five columns inside the gallery had been turned into a row of towering electric poles; the mock fixtures—transformer box, power lines, conductors, and so on—camouflage the upper half of each column so convincingly that the objects making up Unforgettable Electric Poles (all works 2012) seem quite real. Yet there was an estranging effect, as in a daydream: The tall glass wall surrounding the gallery emphasized that this was an interior space, underlining the displaced status of the poles. Abundant details—carefully designed fictive accoutrements, sleek in their form and with surfaces impeccably finished to fetishistic standards, as well as the calculated tension in the aligned connecting cables—contribute to the fictitiousness of the mise-en-scène.

Electric poles have long been among Yamaguchi’s subjects, for instance in drawings accompanied by a statement—fictional, of course—that they were initially prototyped by a Meiji flower-arrangement master who wanted to emphasize their beauty over their functionality, the result being a retro-chic wooden pole with a lacquered transformer box and mini paper lanterns crowned with elegant rooftops. In Unforgettable Electric Poles, a prop-rich narrative develops at eye level too, with various extras attached to each pole: a message board, artificial flowers in a can, a urinal, an overhanging roof where one might take shelter from the rain, and a DIY antiaircraft gun. All represent communication devices, even the overhanging roof standing, as the artist told me, for a potentially romantic encounter underneath, and the mock weapon (based on one in use during World War II) suggesting a particular relationship between a father and the son for whom he made it. The phantasmagoric poles are animated by fabricated stories.

Set in an alcove across from the poles was Right Yet Wrong, a small room furnished like a rental gallery space in the nearby Ginza district, with a carpet, plant pot, sofa set, and framed drawings on the wall (also independent works by Yamaguchi). The scale and the neutral atmosphere were true to life, yet the reality was given a twist by the fact that the room was pitched at a near twenty-degree angle to the ground; the piece was inspired by the artist’s memory of a haunted house in an amusement park where the interior of the room lay askew. The effect of this off-balance world could be nauseating, yet it was the culmination of the artist’s boyish imagination, in which what is seemingly mundane yields to the dominating presence of unreality.

In the adjoining room was Tokio Shan Shui (Tokyo Landscapes), a large panoramic folding screen with eight panels showing a panorama of central Tokyo, installed as if looking out from an observation deck over the city itself. Adopting the eighteenth-century genre known as rakuchū rakugai zu, the classic bird’s-eye-view landscape in and around the capital city, Yamaguchi uses fine brushstrokes to delineate countless buildings, roads, and landmarks. The locations are factual for the most part, yet high fortresses and old castles dot the contemporary megalopolis, layering history, the present, and the imaginary. Yamaguchi reconfigures the conventions and sensibility of Japanese art history, mechanical drawings from the sci-fi subculture, and the lighthearted narratives from popular manga episodes, resulting in a synthesis that, through his exacting draftsmanship, represents a possible generational reconciliation with cultural authenticity post–ōkina monogatari—that is, after the grand narrative.

—Shinyoung Chung