ﾇﾙ庵：騒即是寂∽寂即是騒

The new work, the tea room 'null-an' (null-hermitage), is part of Digital Nature's vernacular folk crafts. It carves out urban landscapes through bricolage, distorting and animating them, thereby transforming our perception of urban noise. It presents the surrounding environment as an experiential work. Surrounding works, themed around 'light and computation', include 'The Shape of Waves, Reflections, Pointillism of the Sea and Sky' and the series 'Re-Digitalization of Waves', where the process of capturing silver sculptures of floating waveforms is considered 'computation by lens', turned into NFTs as digital data and recursively repeated.

'null-an' is a tea room constructed with lenses, deformed mirrors, and speakers. Within computational nature, it contemplates the tea room as an opportunity to embody ethics and norms imprinted on mass (Ochiai's Sehnsucht nach Masse and folk crafts) through tools. The exhibition's title 'null-an: noise as silence ∽ silence as noise' symbolizes the fundamental truth in Digital Nature. It reconsiders the figure-ground relationship where silence emerges from noise and vice versa, through light and sound, constructing a new nature between the observer and the observed. The selection of a series of exhibited works is based on this concept. The use of '∽' in the title, a first since 'Yoichi Ochiai, Beauty of Natural Resolution ∽ End to End Transformation of Material Things ∽ Digital Nature (2018)' at GYRE gallery Omotesando, symbolizes the metaphorical relationship of objects constituting the exhibition. Motifs from the 2018 exhibition, like the repetition of wood wool cement board flooring structures, the mackerel work 'The Shape of Waves, Reflections, Pointillism of the Sea and Sky', and the 'Morpho Scenery with Morpho Butterfly', are evident.

Ochiai has recently developed a deep interest in tea culture. Since starting the permanent exhibition 'Naturally Digital, Digitally Natural (2019)' at the Miraikan in 2017, he has incorporated the relationship between tea culture and computers in his works. 'Computer and Nature, Nature of the Computer' featured a critique of the perceptual differences between a 16th-generation Kichizaemon tea bowl (Sokichi era, red tea bowl) and a metal print mimicking its weight and shape, asking 'Can Aura Reside in Digital?'. In 'Pla-An(Plastic Hermitage) (2021)', made from discarded plastic model runners, he continued to explore sustainability in contemporary subculture as a reinterpretation of the national treasure 'Tai-an'. He also serialized the process of learning the tea ceremony in the monthly 'Tan Ko' as 'Keiko Roku', accompanied by photographs. His photographic exhibition 'FAIR, them partly Leica – Contracontrafreeloading and Dadaism (2023)' at Leica Gallery, featuring prints of vessels by the first Chojiro, frequently showcases the tea motif in Ochiai's activities and exhibitions.