"Heavy Light" at the International Center of Photography

Kenji Yanobe's "Blue Cinema in the Woods" is the first piece you encounter upon entering -- since part of it is video with audio, you can hear it from the lobby and the bookstore. The piece consists of a small building (the aforementioned cinema) that rests on the back of a metal elephant. Standing on a barrel next to the elephant is Torayan, a ventriloquist's dummy wearing a radiation suit with a Geiger counter. Inside the cinema is a video that parodies children's television shows. The video, which also plays on a monitor beside the sculpture, follows the artist's father and his dummy Torayan as they search for a mythical elephant in Thailand. The narrative evolves into a pastiche of nuclear paranoia, including a "duck and cover" cartoon starring Torayan, and ultimately the childlike utopia of the Blue Cinema is revealed to be a specially constructed bomb shelter for the viewers.

Yanobe's piece treats one of the darkest subjects imaginable with a childlike innocence that makes the apocalyptic themes seem all the more creepy. The dummy, Torayan, is also unsettling in that it has the features of both a child and an old man.

Another artist who forces the viewer to examine his or her expectations is Yukio Nakagawa. Most of his photographs look gory, meaty, and biological. "Fountain" looks like the result of a Jello mold filled with with congealed blood. "Destiny" appears to be a ceramic shoe filled with entrails. "Spinabifida" has the appearance of a leathery, decomposed animal phallus. It turns out that Nakagawa's main artistic practice is Ikebana, the art of flower arranging and one of the most traditional Japanese arts. Nakagawa's photographs do not immediately suggest any connection to Ikebana -- rather, they appear to be most connected to gory shock-art and a far cry from flower arranging. It's hard to believe, but "Fountain" is actually tulip petals rather than blood and gore. None of his photographs bear any resemblance to traditional Ikebana. In fact, some of them don't resemble flowers at all. "The Island of Death" is supposed to consist of 20,000 red tulips, but the photograph appears to be an island of ash in a sea of smoldering embers.