The totality of Ota Fine Arts’ Shanghai exhibition “Umeda+Sawa”—a synthesis of works by Tetsuya Umeda and Hiraki Sawa—was mesmerizing, and more than the sum of its seemingly simple parts.

Given its small footprint, Ota’s Shanghai space can be difficult to handle, but in this case, the gallery’s size, coupled with the absence of lighting, reinforced the galactic effects of Umeda’s installation, made up of two components, Swing and Fricco (both 2019). Swing— an assemblage of small acrylic towers rotating on a turntable, lit by two strobe lights—is a relatively simple example of the stroboscopic effect, where a series of intermittently illuminated, turning objects appear to be changing, shrinking and growing, depending on the rate of the flash. 

Fricco was the more visually and materially interesting work of the two. It features a mobile sculpture, dangling from the ceiling, with multiple “branches” that each rotate along varying, ambiguous pathways at different speeds, like a miniature model of a solar system made of fabrics and water-filled glass orbs. The hand of the artist is apparent in the work, as the motors whir and the components stutter unevenly, emulating the organic permutations of planetary orbits. One of the delights of Umeda’s handcrafted display are the little details that are hidden within the design, such as a tiny light that wanders on its own path, almost unnoticed behind the fixed trajectories. Together, these precarious, hanging assemblages float and turn, casting the reflections of ghostly transits around the room. The result is akin to being inside a projected orrery of archaic materials and imprecise simulation, effecting a sense of nostalgia and evoking childhood experiments performed to understand the world.

The revolving shadows cast by Umeda’s mobile were layered atop the soulful spinning seen in Sawa’s wall projection, creating a visual connection between the two artist’s works, which, while conceptually arbitrary, becomes salient through their shared movement. Sawa contributed two videos to the exhibition, Souvenir IV (2012), and Sleeping Machine II (2011). In Souvenir IV, manipulated footage of a twirling woman is superimposed on a video of an empty room, with light pouring in from a single window on the right. Only the parts of her body that are cast in light are visible—the shadowed half of the dancer is transparent. As she rotates, her illuminated limbs are frozen on screen, such that the variations of her positions accumulate in the frame. The result is a record of the actions of her body over the course of around two minutes, before the looped video starts again from the beginning. As with Umeda’s installations, Sawa’s work emits a sense of nostalgia: the room looks like an abandoned space, uninhabited for decades, except for this dancing apparition damned to repeat her pirouette into eternity. 

Sawa’s videos are full of such collages, fragmenting various source images to create scenes that are simultaneously familiar, uncanny, and dreamlike. Souvenir IV is an example of the effectiveness of this technique. On the other hand, Sawa’s second contribution, Sleeping Machine II, was the show’s least successfully integrated element. The video features a procession of goats, seen sometimes on the ground and sometimes across the roof of factories in a series of black-and-white frames. It was difficult to parse a connection between the work and the exhibition as a whole, except for the repetition of the goats’ actions and the mingling of light and shadow throughout the space of the video, which echoed the tropes and movements in Umeda’s installations, and in Souvenir IV. This mysterious addition aside, the show promoted a reconsideration of how a given space can reflect performativity through the use of mechanical means and analogue video, without live performances. “Umeda+Sawa” was a self-contained, complex system unfolding within the fixed boundaries of the gallery space, prompting meditations on our place within universal systems, and our smallness within the gyre.