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Hitoshi Kuriyama was an AiR in S12 from August 21st to September 21st 2013. During the first part of his residency he took over the Gallery and built  a site specific light installation which became a part of the group exhibition What Dwells Inside, opening on August 30th 2013.  The exhibition was based on three traditional artistic expressions; performance, woodblock print and installation by the three artists Hitoshi Kuriyama, Yasumasa Morimura and the group teamLab.

Kuriyama lit up an imaginary universe with his installations of fluorescent light tubes in the gallery. Contrary to most Western art in which the observer is a spectator and analyst of the surface before him, What Dwells Inside took an Asian perspective and reflected on a different technique of viewing. In the exhibition the artists invited the viewer to meditate inside the image and become part of its spirit in order to understand its true significance.

After creating this monumental installation with fluorescent light tubes Kuriyama used his time working on two other projects. He received assistance to work with blown glass, making glass balls and experimenting with the pressure of air inside and outside the ball – experimenting with emptying them of air. Kuriyama was assisted in the workshop by the artist Alli Hoag.

“… it was exciting and a great experience for me to make artwork in the glass workshop because I was inexperienced in glass blowing. It altered my perspective of “glass”.”

The third project Kuriyama worked on was photographing the night view of Bergen. This was a project he had been working on in the East, before coming to S12, he developed the project in Seoul and developed it further in Bergen and then Tokyo. Bergen being surrounded by mountains made it an ideal place to find a point from where to capture the city lights and create a view of earth as if seen from outer-space.

By using long exposure to record the city’s night view, he recorded the path of the light, thus depicting the Earth’s rotation. He was presenting the idea that everything keeps on moving and changing. His question is if there is anything that remains stationary and invariant.

Kuriyama’s projects have taken place in Bad Boll (Germany), Washington D.C.(USA), Sharjah (UAE) and Japan. These projects are a further development of ideas he started in S12 and were shown in the exhibition “What Dwells Inside”. He uses not only fluorescent lights but also neon lights, vacuumed glass tubes, and mirrored glass tubes.

He has continued to develop work partly based on the work  “0=1 -air pressure”, exploring air pressure inside glass.