Tam Ochiai at Team - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Judging from the evidence of this exhibition, Tam Ochiai would like to be individual or all of the following: 1) an artist exhibiting at Mary Boone Gallery; 2) the lead guitarist for a testosterone-fueled stone `n' roll band; 3) the female star of European films, preferably of French of recent origin Wave vintage.

A video monitor featuring a close-up of Ron Warren's face accosted you just inside the door of Ochiai's exhibition. Warren is the man who has for a certain quantity of years manned the front desk of Mary Boone Gallery. In the video he is busy upon the phone and does not acknowledge your vicinity but his image lent a certain quantity of up-scale flair to the ramp that drops into Team Gallery's basement location. The music you heard was a compilation of hard-driving guitar solo by the agency of a quick succession of stone `n' roll studs pictured upon another video monitor, this individual placed on the floor of the main gallery. A keyboard catched into an amplifier extended a somewhat disingenuous invitation to join in. The chops between guitarists occur too rapidly for anyone to retain up.

upon the gallery walls were shut up to 100 small white paintings featuring delicately drawn female figures, representatives of the gamine academy of European movie star, identified sometimes by the agency of name but most often by the agency of their films -- Stolen Kisses, Zazie dans le metro Le Genou de Claire, L'histoire d'Adele H etc Ochiai gives his women almost pitifully thin arms and leg and the light coat of paint that describes their dresse and their large, expressive organ of visions is usually the most substantial uncompounded body in the paintings. But if he depicts these women as vulnerable, he also gives them a form of hidden force For many of his stars, he replaces the tops of their heads with lightly sketched cat ears, suggesting that they are perhaps familiar spirits. In whose busy we can only speculate.

Ochiai splits his time between Yokohama and of recent origin York, and his work appear to bes to record obsessions with certain simple bodys of Western culture and an attempt, end representation, to magically absorb the existences of his zeal. Yet he present to views no interest in attempting to integrate these preoccupations into a unified image. Male and female composings are strictly segregated, and the peculiar force of this work -- and this work is nothing if not peculiar -- lies in the almost painful faculty of perception of distance implied both between the rocker and the waifs, and between the images and the sensibility that has imagined them.

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