T-Ceremony offers a glimpse into the private world of the architect, highlighting his perception of space, relationship to materials, sources of inspiration and aesthetic approach, and reflecting the development of a project – from the first sketch on to the complex computerized architectural plan and through to the completed structure.

 

The works underwent an abstraction process to black-&-white and negative so as to crystallize their meaning and refine the artist's intentions.

 

The media used and the way the works are presented – white silk-screen prints on simple black T-shirts - metamorphose themselves into a central aesthetic narrative or, rather, generate an enigmatic series of open questions, such as: what is the relationship and anti-relationship between architecture /art /fashion? What does an art exhibition have in common with a T-shirt store downtown? And what does Japan have to do with all of this?

 

In the 16th century Japan underwent an aesthetic cultural revolution which found full expression in the Way of Tea (known, erroneously, in English as Tea Ceremony). All traditional perceptions of "what was [considered] worthy" and "what was not [considered] worthy " were shattered during this time. It was an era in which there was a reexamination of the limits between "low" and "high," "special" and "trivial," "center" and "periphery."

 

This cultural transformation brought to the fore of artistic and architectural creativity simple, everyday materials, glorifying the neglected, the rusty, the worn-out, the distorted and the simple; it emphasized the free spirit of creativity and creators. The architecture of the period is characterized by restraint, enigmatism loaded with hidden symbolism and the use of harmony of opposites (yin-yang).

 

The 16th century molded anew traditional Japanese architecture, and particularly the residential house, as the first modernists later acknowledged as they venerated its aesthetic messages.

 

In T-Ceremony architect Arie Kutz uses some of these tools to reexamine the limits between "low" and "high," "special" and "trivial," "center" and "periphery"  to explore – especially for himself, it might be said – the relationship between his own work and Japanese culture.

 

Arie Kutz is a graduate of the Technion, in Israel (1979) and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (1984). Today he works as an architect, town planner and landscape designer, as well as lecturing on Architecture and Gardens in Japan in the Dept. of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. The works exhibited in T-Ceremony were created within the framework of his activities in the companies in which he is a partner – Nir-Kutz Architects, Studio Landscape Architecture, and TA Planner.