Ayomi Yoshida’s installations possess a meticulousness and infinitesimal detail that requires many hours and many hands. Her 23 assistants, all art students whom she brought with her from Tokei University in Japan, have been working on the installation since the beginning of last week.
When my supervisor introduced me to them, they smiled and went on to gush over my dress. The only word I understood in their fast string of Japanese was “kawaii”, and I flashed a smile and was quite surprisingly fished the Japanese word for “Thank you” from the back of my mind: “Arigato!”
A chair was immediately pulled up for me next to a long table, and a girl with short dyed-auburn hair gestured for me to take a brush and showed me how to apply paste over tiny blue raindrop-tadpole-shaped petals. I quickly became part of quite an efficient system: two people placed the petals onto black cards, six people brushed these petals with paste, four others (plus Ayomi Yoshida) transferred the cut-outs from the cards onto a large plastic covering, and one person wiped the black cards free of excess paste, and the cycle would continue.
Despite the language barrier, Yoshida’s students were incredibly sweet and easy to warm up to. In broken English, they asked about my life at Carleton and my interests; they even switched the music from Japanese rock n roll to Taylor Swift after we expressed a common adoration for her.
When I had the honor of pasting the petals next to Ayomi Yoshida herself, she thanked me earnestly for my help. What struck me the most about working alongside her and her assistants on the installation was that although the work was tedious and long, it was infused with an energy and joy. Yoshida’s assistants worked for hours without break (while I had to occasionally get up to stretch or use the restroom), chatting and joking, communicating polite thank yous and apologies, and listening to music.
Later on in the day, some other Carleton students from Fred Hagstrom’s Printmaking class joined in, and were as pleasantly surprised as I was to discover how accessible and open Yoshida and her assistants had made the process of installation. Partaking in Yoshida’s installation process gave me an understanding for the great labor necessary to create her work; it is fascinating how much painstaking effort is required to imitate the complexity of real cherry blossom trees.
The thought that the beautiful detail of each unique petal would be lost to many viewers once the collage was installed onto the ceiling seemed a shame to me. But it also reminded me that in the same way, the wonders and beauty of the world are often invisible to the passing viewer; it is necessary to delve deep into the process itself, to study and work, to come to appreciate the small things. Yoshida and her students are doing just that throughout this week until the opening of the show on Friday, January 22.