Tapetum Lucidum presents three bodies of work by artist Tam Ochiai, spanning his migration to New York in 1990 to the present. From his early shopping bag works of the 1990s to the outsized figure paintings of the 2000s to, finally, the ashtray sculptures of the 2010s, the works assembled here chart Ochiai's ongoing investigation of mark-making, appropriation, and the genre of painting.

Beginning in 1992, a mere two years after his arrival in New York City, Ochiai began to stretch plastic shopping bags over small wooden frames. Emblazoned with popular brand names such as Gap, Comme des Garçons, and the United Colors of Benetton, these readymade containers are lifted to the level of fine art by way of deceptively simple gestures. Ochiai variously turns, crops, and pulls the bags over hand-made stretchers, hanging them such that they take on the aspect of painting. As makeshift canvases, the bags come pre-primed with the signs of advertising: names, logos, discount announcements and eye-catching graphics. Yet removed from their original contexts, these sundry words and images become ground for the artist’s own painterly marks—minor brushstrokes that by turns mirror, complement, or contradict the pictorial-commercial logic of the bags themselves. Belittling the Abstract Expressionist gesture, whose mythology had already dwindled by the late 1980s, Ochiai offers in its place what critic Midori Matsui has called “a droll mixture of Appropriationist irony and Neo-Dada iconoclasm,” a lament on the impossibility of originality.

The referential web of Ochiai’s shopping bag paintings, however, extends not only outward to the worlds of commercial and artistic circulation, but also inward, hermetically, among the works themselves. Greenberg (1992), for one, masquerades as a bag painting with its small size and evenly-spaced paint smears—splotches of cherry-blossom pink in the upper-left-hand corner. The word “Greenberg” appears front and center as if typeset in serif font. What kind of brand, the viewer is prompted to ask, is Greenberg? What goods could this shopping bag contain? Such questions dissolve upon closer examination, for the work is revealed to be entirely painted. There is no bag here, no inside, only paint and surface. Clement Greenberg, the formalist art historian who championed Abstract Expressionism against other forms of avant-garde art, is here the butt of a joke, and it is only by setting up the accumulation of shopping bag paintings in the series, allowing for comparison among them, that Ochiai achieves this surprising subversion—an entirely artificial work camouflaged among otherwise détourned readymades.

The artist’s conversation with art history does not end here. MoMA (1994), for instance, takes aim at the institutionalization of art. The sketchy diagram printed on this bag comes from Joseph Beuys’s 1971 How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome (So kann die Parteiendiktatur überwunden werden)—a polyethylene shopping bag filled with informational pamphlets campaigning against the parliamentary system. Beuys’s own irreverent mixture of political action and product advertising is heightened by MoMA’s issuing of non-art versions of the bag, which Ochiai ostensibly acquired at the museum. By transforming the bag back into art, overlaying his paint marks over Beuys’s diagram of capital flow, Ochiai intervenes in the layered, and often contradictory, economy of institutional critique.

In many ways, the logic of the face paintings Ochiai produced in the early 2000s is similar to that of the bags—both query the minimum action required for the constitution of meaning, as well as the relationship between figure and ground.

While, in the bag series, the brushstroke is reduced to tiny footnotes in the margins, here they rush forth with diluvian energy. In Dual (2003), thick, saturated curves swing forcefully across the canvas, while in Simone’s Confession (2000) and Simone: can you cat my hair? (2000), large swathes of color suffuse the composition. These surface treatments invariably form the hair of Ochiai’s waifish figures, hiding their feline noses, upturned lips, and occasional dusting of freckles. Any recognizably human feature, though, is only sketched out with a few lines of color pencil, drawing a sharp contrast between the fundamental elements of painting—lineamenta and superficies, line and plane—as surmised by Renaissance art theorist Leon Battista Alberti. Ochiai’s brushstrokes, in their haphazard application and raw materiality, constitute abstract planes of color, yet they only take on representational significance as hair when put in relation with the anatomical precision of the line. The one, significantly, does not contain or inhabit the other as they often do in painting, but stand apart, positing juxtaposition rather than cohesion as a unifying force. In this vein, despite being associated with the works of Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito, due partly to their micropop appearance, Ochiai’s portraits are rather more like Leonardo’s drawings of female faces ensconced by flowing hair, which art historian Aby Warburg once defined as the pathos of painting.

These bewegtes Beiwerk, or animated accessories, are for Warburg the outward displacement of inner turmoil, and it is their fluttering that serves as the unifying thread of western art history. Contour and color, pencil and paint, movement and emotion, these are the constituent parts of painting that Ochiai tests in his radical, as in relating to the root, practice.

The ashtray series, finally, comprises hybrid artworks which feature aspects of both sculpture and painting. These pieces consist of painted two-dimensional panels, laid on their backs, with antique ashtrays embedded in, or affixed on, their surfaces. These so-called “ashtray sculptures” sport the visible evidence of their use, an accelerated patina. The artist intends the ashtrays for employment, and visitors are invited to smoke in the space, dispensing of their ashes and cigarette butts on the artwork. The fact that the ashtrays are bought secondhand is significant: they are charged with the mystery of their previous existences, their past owners and users. They reflect Ochiai’s ongoing interest in the poetic possibilities of containers, brackets as placeholders for their implied contents. The artist considers the traces we leave, the seemingly minuscule marks we make, as metonymies for our lives at large.

The ashtray, in the past decade or so, has turned from a common functional object to a relative novelty, albeit a familiar one. As smokers are pushed outdoors – indoor smoking not merely shunned in polite society, but usually rendered illegal – these items become increasingly imbued with nostalgia, relics from a recently bygone past. Most of the ashtrays contained in these works are from the 1930’s and 40’s, collected by Ochiai via both the Internet and from antique shops across the world. By recontextualizing the found objects, attaching them to the surfaces of these delicately painted and irregularly shaped panels, the artist isolates and enhances their diverse and alluring formal characteristics, without erasing their original intended use or implied individual histories.

Several of the works on view provide a new iteration of one of Ochiai’s ongoing projects, which he debuted at Team Gallery in 2015 with the exhibition “Everyone Has Two Places”. These works operate on a deceptively forthright conceit: each piece displays the names of two cities, often the birth- and death-places of an historical figure, especially fellow artists, writers, musicians, actors, and filmmakers. The titular “places” serve as bookends, which not only chart the movement of the body, but likewise index the volume of a life’s work. With this show, he introduces a complicating aspect to the body of work: the cities are represented by souvenir ashtrays – a work titled “Diane Arbus”, for example, features two “New York City” ashtrays. These mysterious sculptures function as tender tributes to their subjects, poignant reminders of the close connection between an artist’s work and life.

“Besides, one can easily realize how the imitations that painting presents to us can move us when one stops to think how a shell, or perhaps a medal where time has left only ghosts of letters and figures, excite restless passions and arouse the desire to see them and to possess them.”—Diderot

Tam Ochiai’s highly referential work at Ulrik brought to my mind this brief passage in Diderot’s definition from the encyclopedia, as his work’s concern would seem to primarily be with the moments of what one might consider the minor appearance of painting alongside such activities as travel, writing, smoking, browsing magazines, or shopping, etc. Overtly, we’re asked: is it still painting if it is held alongside models in Tokyo during a fashion show, if it appears on the jib of a sailboat, if one ashes on it while smoking a cigarette, if it is simply a piece of tablecloth after a dinner, or even the table itself?

This has all been confirmed, of course, the question regarding painting’s larger dispersal, but it is also flipped on its head in the painting of Ochiai, with painting’s capital S Serious History re-inserted into his nominal practice via its Joan Mitchell gestural brushstroke in Vibrissae (cf. the prints she made with Kenneth Tyler in the 80s and 90s), its Duchampian gouache blotches on the many shopping bags (cf. Pharmacy), or the Seurat of his Evian water bottle painting, Evin, not to mention the overt Greenberg reference as well as the inclusion of works themselves in the form of a MoMA reproduction of a Beuys multiple from 1971 (during the despicable ‘political’ period) titled So kann die Parteiendiktatur überwunden werden (How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome). Following this logic, one is even tempted to see in the ashtray works a certain Kölnisches temperament, or a similarity to the writing as drawing as seen in his Travel series and elsewhere, to that found in John Cage’s score for Water Music.

Ochiai’s works are to be placed somewhere between the above mentioned Diderot moment of rendering a torn billboard, à la the affichistes, into an artwork, the everyday experience of aestheticizing something like the edges of a piece of cardboard from a container of soda on the sidewalk, and of a practitioner keenly aware of the discourse and its provisional relation to life. The practice of painting that travels alongside the artist while he does his shopping and browses magazines, collecting the bags and using them as surface, with that idea perhaps finally reaching some culmination in the Evian work, where movie titles, the naive drawing of juvenilia, and impressionist pointillism are combined in a way familiar to all. It is easy to imagine finding such an image, that seen in Evin, as if torn from a magazine in a lobby, the work of some sketch artist remembering vaguely “French” things, waiting for their call and remembering its New Wave, dotting some new markers recently acquired onto the page’s end, filling in some blanks with red and blue pen, and doodling a familiar feline character at a café.

—Ivan Gaytan

Tam Ochiai, born in Yokohama, Kanagawa in 1967, lives and works in New York. Ochiai studied at Wako University, Machida, Tokyo and completed an M.A at New York University in 1993. Exhibitions include Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan (1995); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2002); Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2005); Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan (2006); WATARIUM Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2010); and Yokohama Triennale 2011: Yokohama Museum of Art; NYK Waterfront Warehouse, Kanagawa, Japan (2011); Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, Japan (2021); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan (2023); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (1999). Ochiai’s works are held in the collections of The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The Japan Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Deutsche Bank