Evanouissement Goodbye My Friend
Between 1989 and his premature death in 1991, Kuramata produced his valedictory works. In the tinted aluminum Laputa, named for the fantastic island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he reconfigures the double bed for two sleepers lying head-to-head or toe-to-toe, enforcing physical separation between the absent lovers’ bodies. The bed’s uncanny deformation, heightened in the silk coverings printed in a disturbingly faux version of Kuramata’s Star Terrazzo, evokes its function as the site of dreams, memories, and nightmares as well as the locus of the life cycle: of suffering, of rest, of birth, sex, and death.
Created in homage to the ancient Japanese tradition of flower arranging, Ephemera, a set of elegant vases in acrylic and aluminum, each holding one flower, plays a poetic variation on the themes of elongation, solitude, and organic process. The vases’ extended necks are perennially bent, conjuring up images of flowers wilting, or of human heads bowed in prayer or mourning.