The House of Glass Noodles

University of Sunderland, 2021

H a a p a s a a ri, Riikk a (2 0 2 1) Gl a s s t a ki n g t h e le a d: gl a s s-info r m e d fil m m a ki n g in c r e a tiv e p r a c tic e. Do c t o r al t h e si s, U niv e r si ty of S u n d e rl a n d. Do w nlo a d e d fro m: h t t

Italy-Japan. Dialogues on Food, 2021

Cooking and dining scenes have been a ubiquitous presence in Japanese cinema since its inception, and the relationship between Japanese people and food has been frequently exploited to play out family dynamics, rites of passage, etc. Therefore, the dining room often becomes the place where drama unfolds in striking contrast with this supposedly safe environment. This paper focuses on three films where dining scenes are particularly relevant – Ozu Yasujirō’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Morita Yoshimitsu’s The Family Game (1983) and Miike Takashi’s Visitor Q (2001) – in order to analyse how Japanese cinema has documented the transformation of family relations in time.

Transparency & Architecture: Challenging the Limits, 2007

Through the storefront glazing, or the protective security glass of an artwork at an exhibition, even the screen of a television set, the portrayed object acquires significant magnitude. For such a transformation to occur, the physical attributes of glass are critical. As a result, objects from the surrounding environment, including the viewer, are projected onto the glass surface along with lights and the objects behind the glass, in a momentary optical composition. In contrast, other physical properties of the glass surface, such as its cold sense, as well as its stiffness and rigidity as a physical limit, along with its hardness and sharpness in case it breaks, preserve the distance between the viewer and the displayed objects. In an attempt to further develop on such thoughts, this paper analyses the perceptive operations triggered by the interference of a glass surface between an object and the viewer. Relevant cases are being examined in which the glass also perpetuates polarizations such as between the illusionary and the real, the ephemeral and the permanent, the idol and the material as well. Index Terms  Marcel Duchamp, object of desire, voyeurism, fetishism, Robert Doisneau, Helmut Newton, Richard Hamilton, Issey Miyake, subject/object.

positions: asia critique, 2014

In this interview the Japanese avant-garde filmmaker and scholar, Toshio Matsumoto, discusses his creative practice, as well as his ideas about the complexities of representing reality, memory, and time. He has numerous short experimental works to his credit, and four feature-length narrative films including Bara no soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Shura (Demons, 1971), Juroku-sai no senso (The War of the Sixteen-Year-Olds, 1973), and Dogura magura (Dogra Magra, 1988). He has contributed significantly to the critical study of film in Japan as well, writing among things Eizo no hakken (Discovery of the Image, 1963/2005), Hyogen no sekai (World of Expression, 1967), and Genshi no bigaku (Aesthetics of Illusion, 1976). Despite these many accomplishments, Matsumoto has gone largely unrecognized in US scholarship. The conception and representation of reality, memory, and time are significant tropes in Matsumoto's films. Bara no soretsu, for instance, set in the gay district o...

Architecture and Film Symposium, 2021

Tokyo Story (1953) inscribes plenty of vignettes from everyday life of Japanese homes. Whereas various home visits, daily conversations, and household chores paint the surface of the film, the roiling emotions and transient relations, underneath this surface, give cue to how home environment is shaped from and out of the embodied relations with things. This research takes a phenomenological lens to look at the embodied relations that are mostly unconscious, contextual, and omnipresent. The paper, firstly, demonstrates the frame-shaping techniques of Tokyo Story entailing associations with the context of dwelling experience. It then investigates themes within the framed relations that imply temporariness and transience. The research hence signifies the atmospheric quality of home by articulating what dissociates from it. That includes dwindling relations with the dwelling, as well as capturing the absences and particular placements that haul out of the home environment. More generally, this research also aims to showcase the strength of film studies in examining how spaces are actually lived and what constitutes the atmosphere of home.

As viewers of the world we are accustomed to looking through flat surfaces of glass at objects on display, framed by edges that direct our looking into confined areas. Glass is thus conventionally regarded as protective, of our vision and of what it encloses. But glass is also deeply susceptible to external forces; it is fragile, like bodies, making it a symbolically heady material for artists invested in feminist renegotiations of the objectified body. Hannah Wilke, VALIE EXPORT, and Gina Pane each negotiate(d) bodily relationships in their work, using the medium of glass, specifically broken glass, as a means to disrupt the logical integrity of the gaze. Wilke, in her 1976 performance Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass, playfully stripped behind Duchamp’s infamously cracked Large Glass (1915-23). EXPORT, in her 1971 performance EROS/ION, rolled around naked in a scattered arrangement of shattered glass. In both works, the broken glass disrupts the pleasure of looking at the naked female body. Pane smashed through plates of glass and masticated a glass cup, mixing blood with glass so that body and material became one. Pane’s skin, like EXPORT’s, became marked by the puncture of sharp edges of glass, resulting in performative wounds that oozed blood, breaking the boundaries between internal and external. By connecting the abject with glass, these three artists lead us to reconsider the physical and conceptual nature of glass and its relation to our bodies, whereby broken glass reflects the “body in pieces” in a feminist gesture of reclamation.

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema, 2022

This essay focuses on the stylistic element of “framing” in relation to both interior and exterior urban cinematic space in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story, where the main characters from different class and cultural backgrounds dwell. It explores the interactions between characters and the rapidly changing physical and social environments with which they are associated and situated: the newly emerging urban bourgeois (Ah Zhen and her colleagues) with aloofly refined apartments and dwarfing office buildings, the local taxi driver (Ah Qin) with dilapidated houses and neighborhoods, the small business owner (Ah Long) with the old commercial center Dihua street, and the adolescents with disco nightclubs, deserted buildings, open space, and motorcycles that symbolize mobility, speed and hazard. The ever-changing Taipei in the mid-1980s is a politically significant chronotope of imagining the beyond. Just as Ah Long and the Dihua street are considered outdated by Ah Zhen’s colleagues who frequent the newly developed commercial “East District,” Tokyo is tied to the old colonial past and California to the neocolonial global capitalist future. Linguistic demarcations (Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, and English) of social class and cultural identity connect and traverse these different temporalities and spaces, resembling the glass windows pervasive in Taipei Story. As I will show, the film’s modes of transparency and reflection confuse and obscure distances and boundaries, filling its spaces with anxiety, anger, desolation, violence and illusions that will only ever be illusions.

2018

This arts-based thesis focuses on notions of mapping a home of belonging. By investigating creative ways to re-story our past, present, and future, it considers what we might do to satisfy this basic human longing and necessity. Born out of a personal need, the study could be seen as a response to the growing social problem of loneliness and anxiety throughout the Western world and, more particularly, in the arts industry. Underpinned by a social constructionist paradigm, the research has engaged with a range of ideas and methods from Theatre, Postmodern Therapies, and the Human Potential Movement, as well as studies in Home culture and mythology. This interdisciplinary approach has been driven by my own arts practice, which was deployed to devise and stage three original performances—Home (2012, 2015), Eve (2012, 2017), and He Dreamed a Train (2014, 2017)—collectively entitled The Belonging Trilogy. These shows, generated over six years, became a way of writing new personal mytholo...