I saw a book of photos on the internet called “Tokyo Blues” by Nurri Kim and it made me realise why a certain kind of reductive abstract thinking bores me. I don’t mind so much the photos, but the framing of them bores me.

This photographer took some photos of blue tarps found in Tokyo.

To emphasise the blue tarps, she turned the photos into black and white images, and further saturates the blue of the blue tarps in each photo.

So whereas previously we would miss them, now we see them, since they are isolated, teased out, abstracted, objectified from their surrounding context.

This objectification is a conscious-full framing by the photographer. The title of the book “Tokyo Blues” further plays with the double meaning of the word “blue.” OK the tarps are blue(1), but also give the blues(2).

Then someone is asked to contribute a foreword.

This person tells us where the word “tarpaulin” comes from. It’s “tar” plus “palling”: spreading tar over thick canvas to make them water resistant. Then she continues this wordplay linking the Japanese word for home “ucchi” with “hootchie,” which is American army slang for temporary shelters. So there we have it, tarp = something temporary. This allows her to say “tarpaulin shelters keeps things in as much as they keep things out.”

Why does she do that?

So that she can now associate the word “temporary” with “transitional” and “liminal,” a movement from the physical to the metaphorical: “the Tokyo Blues tarpaulins are strong visual and material reminders of the temporary quality of some social and spatial boundaries, and Kim’s photos encourage the viewer to focus on transitional – or liminal – spaces and objects that are so often overlooked or ignored.” How familiar we are with these ways of seeing after so many years of culture studies.

Then someone else contributes an accompanying essay, to further explain what we are looking at. He asserts that these photos are “an almost encyclopedic summary” of the way blue tarps are used. And here is the meaning of these photos: “they capture the major themes … mobility, … transience; experience; desperation; and … absence.” Further, he “decode(s)” these photos to “illuminate” aspects of Japanese psyche: “cleanliness,” notions of “shelter,” “property,” “transition,” “denial,” “negation,” etc., etc. And because of the illuminating photos, now, he re-”discovers” the real Tokyo, un”sugarcoated.” For “perversely enough,” he has come to see “the blue plastic tarp as something “symbolic;” a kind of “presence of nature,” which he claims is impossible in Tokyo, and because of that, he claims victory for the “return of the repressed.”

So now we have it: the photos of blue tarps (only blue ones?) in Tokyo, abstracted, framed in photos, analysed and given metaphors such as “transience,” “desperation,” become aspects of Japanese psyche and symbol of a return of an otherwise repressed nature in the concrete jungle of Tokyo.

The same pattern of abstract cognitive thinking can be observed in the thinking behind the red swing by Bureau des Mesarchitectures at the Shenzhen Hong Kong Biennale. Lofty enough, they aimed to link abstract thinking with bodily experience through architecture:

‘ “Double Happiness” is designed to respond to the society of materialism and to facilitate the reactivation of public space. By interacting with the work and testing their own limits, two people can experience together a new perception of space, void, and lightness; and recover an awareness of the physical world.’

What they really mean is this: you get up a red swing in pairs, elevated somewhat from the ground, when you swing you are supposed to feel a new “freedom” and a new communality with your fellow swinger of swings and this action will do something (”reactivate”) to your notion of public space (in Shenzhen, and by extension China, or a universal notion of public space).

During the biennale, I too took a test ride on the swing, just to be sure. It was a very normal feeling, the same you would get on a normal non – “urban-reanimation-device.” Bodily, there was no new feeling to it, no “liberation” there for me. And I suspect for many more others. The whole meaning of this thing was fore-closed in the authors’ minds.