ocean & wavz
kaijū
Ocean & Wavz
怪獣 For Ever Remain (PandeMix), 2021
Music, video, 8’12”
Copyright©2021 Singapore WAVZ PTE LTD. All rights reserved.
The Japanese word kaijū (litterally “strange beast”) originally refers to giant monsters and creatures from ancient Japanese legends, which are usually depicted attacking major cities and engaging the military, or other kaijū, in battle.
It earlier appeared in the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), a compilation of mythic geography and beasts. Versions of the text may have existed since as early as the 4th century BC, but the present form was not reached until the early Han dynasty a few centuries later. It is largely a fabulous geographical and cultural account of pre-Qin China as well as a collection of Chinese mythology. The book is divided into eighteen sections and describes over 550 mountains and 300 channels.
After sakoku had ended (鎖国, “closed country”, isolationist foreign policy from 1633 to 1853 banning any travelling in/out Japan) and the country was opened to foreign relations, the term kaijū came to be used to express concepts from paleontology and legendary creatures from around the world. For example, in 1908 it was suggested that the extinct Cratosarus was alive in Alaska, and this was referred to as kaijū. However, there are no traditional depictions of kaiju or kaiju-like creatures in Japanese folklore.
The kaijū genre is a subgenre of tokusatu (特撮, “special filming”) entertainment. The 1954 film Godzilla is commonly regarded as the first kaijū film.
Kaijū characters are metaphorical in nature. Godzilla, for example, serves as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, reflecting the fears of post-war Japan following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
(Extracts from Wikipedia)
The real
Ocean & Wavz
-ism, 2021
Music, video, 5’25”
Copyright©2021 Singapore WAVZ PTE LTD. All rights reserved.
What we call “reality” is actually already a re-presentation
framed by fiction, narration, history, propaganda, lie, pretention of truth, memory, landscape, documentary.
The figure has the ability to produce an effect of « the real »
that consists of turning mimesis (imitation of reality) against itself
by radical dissimilarity or literal operation.
What we name “the real” is not synonym of reality,
it is rarely a (human) construction or re-presentation
through language and image.
According to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “The real, or what is perceived as such, is absolutely resisting to
symbolization (symbolic)” 1Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire – Livre I – Les Ecrits techniques de Freud (1953-1954), Paris : Seuil, Coll. Champ Freudien, 1991, p.80. Thus, the real always escapes from/to language and reality, a kind of unspeakable, traumatic
experience, beyond any truth.
All the question is thus to observe how a figure can be created to open up the image to something that is out of any
representation.
Larys Frogier, curator and author of the exhibition/publication Arriscar O Real / Risk The Real, Lisbon: Museu Colecção Berardo, 8 June – 30 August 2009.
[1] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire – Livre I – Les Ecrits techniques de Freud (1953-1954), Paris : Seuil, Coll. Champ Freudien, 1991, p.80
Ocean & Wavz, an artist duo engaged in the production of sound, text and image.