The event

The National Art Center, Tokyo has cele­brated its 10^th Anni­ver­sary in January. As a comme­mo­ra­tion, it presented the museum acti­vi­ties of the past ten years in the Special Exhi­bi­tion Gallery room, which was super­im­posed with a large instal­la­tion “Forest of Numbers” — the symbo­liza­tion of the next 10 years to come. Used without any parti­tion walls for the first time, the 2000 square meter White Cube exhi­bi­tion room became a canvas of the instal­la­tion, filled with “100 colors”, inspi­ra­tion and emotion, which became the largest instal­la­tion of Emma­nu­elle Moureaux’s work.

The architect

Emma­nu­elle Moureaux is a French archi­tect living in Tokyo since 1996, where she estab­lished “emma­nu­elle moureaux archi­tec­ture + design” in 2003. Inspired by the layers and colors of Tokyo that built a complex depth and density on the street, and the Japa­nese tradi­tional spatial elements like sliding screens, she has created the concept of shikiri, which lite­rally means “divi­ding (crea­ting) space with colors”. She uses colors as three-dimen­sional elements, like layers, in order to create spaces, not as a finis­hing touch applied on surfaces. Hand­ling colors as a medium to compose space, her wish is to give emotion through colors with her crea­tions, which range from art, design to archi­tec­ture.

The installation

The instal­la­tion “Forest of Numbers” visua­lized the decade of the future from 2017 to 2026, created a sense of still­ness across the large exhi­bi­tion space. More than 60,000 pieces of suspended numeral figures from 0 to 9 were regu­larly aligned in three dimen­sional grids. A section was removed, created a path that cut through the instal­la­tion, invited visi­tors to wonder inside the colorful forest filled with numbers. The instal­la­tion was composed of 10 layers which is the repre­sen­ta­tion of 10 years time. Each layer employed 4 digits to express the rele­vant year such as 2, 0, 1, and 7 for 2017, which were randomly posi­tioned on the grids. As part of Emmanuelle’s “100 colors” instal­la­tion series, the layers of time were colored in 100 shades of colors, created a colorful time travel through the forest.

Inside the colorful forest, two girls and one cat were lost inside, added playful­ness to the instal­la­tion. In concert with the instal­la­tion, the compi­la­tion of exhi­bi­tion posters from the last ten years filled the wall on the right, and the oppo­site wall across the room simply expressed the next ten years with white numbers. Because photo­graphy was excep­tio­nally allowed, the instal­la­tion has spread through various social networks, incre­asing number of visi­tors. This instal­la­tion was created with the coope­ra­tion of 300 volun­teers, excited the atten­tion of over 20,000 visi­tors in10 days.