The Jersey City Independent "

Hiroshi Kumagai‘s “Garden of Binary Love” is filled with a blooming assortment of portraits that explode in pixelated Technicolor waves. In his second solo show at 58 Gallery, the artist cuts and slices his way through layer upon layer of brightly-colored vinyl to recreate snapshots of people engaged in video chat. The stills, taken from internet search engines and video chat websites and transformed into blocks of bold color, feature people the artist doesn’t know, but whose images or screen names he found while browsing online.

This bizarre combination of anonymity and exhibitionism is what Kumagai finds so engaging about digital communication.

“These images really come from video chat,” he explains. “Nothing is staged: it is a real attempt to communicate.”

Except that we aren’t the intended recipient. We, and the artist, are eavesdropping on private conversations that have been broadcast across the internet. We’ve intercepted, stumbled into other people’s lives, and detached ourselves just enough to boil each individual down into a familiar digital stereotype.

The show, which opened last Thursday, kicks off with “New hairdo,” a technically elaborate piece of a girl swishing her long hair in front of the camera. It’s easy to imaging she’s flirting with us, adopting what seems to be that same tell-me-I’m-sexy attitude people assume when taking profile pictures of themselves. The real girl might not know she’s out there for the world to see, that she’s become a film still for someone else to collect — but here she is, tossing her hair publicly for a private audience in a gallery, and online.

That awareness of observation is one of the fundamental questions Kumagai raises in his vinyl reproductions. We are never sure if we’re looking at an image that someone meant to be public, or a stray bullet in cyberspace. Images like “Cum4free,” a closeup of two girls making out for the camera, and “I heart U,” a crotch shot of a girl in her underwear, are more clearly examples of standard online party tricks, but others, like “Two Grandmas,” a picture of two old women leaning over a computer screen, could be purely accidental.

“Some people just have a live [video] feed they leave on all day,” Kumagai says.

All of these people are trying to communicate something, but — out of context — we’re just not sure what’s lost in translation. For Kumagai, a native of Japan who moved to the U.S. when he was 18, this form of digital language is especially fascinating. His vinyl images are ultimately transcriptions, the breakdown of a coding system that’s being broadcast around the globe without anyone really knowing who’s giving, who’s receiving, and what being able to watch the lives of strangers through their personal videos really implies.

Kumagai’s working in vinyl fits. It’s a synthetic material, a feat of technology in itself, but also a medium that keeps the artist somewhat removed from the images he’s creating. Cutting out the pieces is much more objective.

“It’s not like painting, where every stroke is personal,” he says. “I can be so distant from the image — it’s just, cut … cut.” Even in the construction this sense of voyeurism remains intact, as images are transferred from screen to panel with minimal manipulation.

This is not a show that tells you what to think about digital communication, nor one that really judges how people use the medium. As you stare into the intricately-pixelated face of “LonelyBear71″ (the sole man depicted in this exhibition), it’s difficult to know how to feel. But that’s ultimately the conflict that makes this show so pertinent: Just what are we communicating online, and why?

Image: ‘She said she didn’t study for the exam either’

Hiroshi Kumagai: “Garden of Binary Love”
58 Gallery
58 Coles St.
Sept. 10 – Sept. 27, 2009

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