Japanese Art: Less ‘Whammo’ This Time Around

Elisa Turner

Miami Herald, October 26

Exhibition review of "JAPAN:RISING" at The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, 2003

Paper Weight

Certainly among their most fascinating finds for this show are the hand-cut paper sculptures of Noriko Ambe. They are like topographical maps unusually adept and conveying the undulating contours of geography, but they capture the eye with a meticulous sensibility that briefly recalls old-fashioned French lace.

Ambe works with stacks of white housho-shi calligraphic paper, a material rooted in 11th-century traditions, and she uses her cutting tools with the swerving concision and elegance of a calligrapher's brush stroke. But she also applies her technique to newspapers, reference books and magazines, occasionally serving up weird juxtapositions of text and image.

The appeal of this work is wonderfully tactile. They are objects with a smooth and prickly surface you can practically feel just through looking. They also lead the eye through a tale of peaks and pitfalls, a landscape rolling with traditions reinvented. And they offer these sturdy observations using fragile materials couched in the intricate charm of Japanese origami.

You can see Ambe's works as miniature landscapes or gardens. In this way they recall this island country's economical appetite for making the most out of the small scale-think of pots of bound and dwarfed trees or the grimmer manifestation of bound feet as symbols of feminine desirability

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