BRUSH THE SKY: ODOROKU

2015 - 2020

Tamiko Thiel / Midori Kono Thiel

*1957 in the USA

For millennia, East Asian artists have enhanced paintings with calligraphy: the abstract, gestural qualities of the brushstrokes reverberating in the meanings of text and image. In “Brush the Sky”, a mother and daughter duo brings this ancient art into the 21st century: using augmented reality, Tamiko Thiel projects the calligraphies created by her mother Midori Kono Thiel onto the therapy centre, incorporating the public space around the graduation towers into the art site. By creating the symbols visible here, produced in 2015, Midori Kono Thiel emphasised the abstract nature of calligraphic art by deconstructing Japanese characters across multiple, parallel transparent sheets in a non-traditional manner. The result is abstract calligraphy. With her daughter’s app and the help of smartphones of visitors to the triennial in Bad Rothenfelde, scans of the original transparent sheets are overlaid onto the therapy centre.

Tamiko Thiel participated in the group exhibition entitled Energy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019, among other things, and shared her augmented reality tour Archive Gardens with visitors to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2017. For more information on Tamiko Thiel, visit http://tamikothiel.com.