nwasianweekly.com
Nov. 3, 2007

Images provided by 911 Media Arts Center

Don’t miss out on this interactive 3-D virtual reality installation, where the viewer gets directly involved with the art. The images can be overwhelming at times —  you’ve been warned!

“The Travels of Mariko Horo” trips out in Seattle

By Gei Chan
Northwest Asian Weekly

Picture yourself wandering though time and space, exploring islands that take you to heaven and sometimes hell — but don’t worry because in this universe, hell isn’t permanent, and you can be reborn again and again in a Venice-like Japan. Just get back into your virtual reality gondola, and steer towards one of those islands for further adventures.

This is not a new video game, but the 911 Media Arts Center’s exhibit of “The Travels of Mariko Horo,” created by Japanese American media artist Tamiko Thiel.

This interactive 3D installation is a novel and adventurous way to view art. On one wall of an empty, spacious darkened room is a large 9 by 12 foot screen. At the other end of the room is a podium with a joystick, the kind used in video games. Using the joystick, the viewer decides which direction on the screen to explore and at what speed. A steady hand is advisable because the images are so peripatetic, with a tendency to disappear and reappear, there is a real risk of “seasickness”!

This isn’t just a visually stunning journey but an auditory one as well. The sound and original music, composed by Ping Jin, a professor of music at SUNY/New Paltz, are no less important to the experience than the visuals. From scene to scene, the music corresponds to the images, sometimes producing a jarring jolt as tranquil lapping water gives way to bullets and roaring flames.

“The Travels of Mariko Horo” is a nice complement to the Seattle Art Museum exhibit “Japan Envisions the West,” which showcases works by Japanese artists who imagined what the Western world was like during Japan’s years of self-imposed isolation from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s. Thiel’s work was inspired by such influences, but she pushes this vision to much more extreme ends, producing an unexpected blending, and occasional clashing, of Eastern and Western religious symbols.

It’s important to keep an open mind because the heavy Buddhist and Christian imagery is not necessarily comfortably merged, and some may find the combination of images disturbing. In one scene the Christian Madonna has an Asian face. Some may be offended by the depiction of Christ with multiple arms like those seen on Buddhist and Hindu figures. East meets West in some scenes that are bright and beautiful, others that are dark and disturbing.

Thiel has exhibited internationally, and her installation “Beyond Manzanar,” about the Japanese internment experience, has been at galleries and festivals all over the world, with one edition in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art in California. She lives in Germany, but her roots are in Seattle, where her parents reside and where her grandfather was a minister at Blaine Memorial United Methodist Church, after converting from Buddhism to Christianity.

“Travels of Mariko Horo” is at 911 Media Arts, 402 Ninth Ave. N, Seattle, through Nov. 20. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.911media.org.

Gei Chan can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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