Megumi Shauna Arai: Immanent Infinite
Words by Michael Cavuto
every body crafts a recognition of its present or else disappears – Lisa Robertson
The work of artist Megumi Shauna Arai delves into centuries-old histories of textile practices across cultures to draw a continuously morphing range of processes into new material and aesthetic realities. Her vocabulary of textures, surfaces, and sutures generate a matrix of encounters with historical and personal archives from residencies, apprenticeships, and libraries across the world. But Arai’s work is not historical in disposition—these pieces do not index or catalogue traditional techniques nor do they collage cultural signatures. Instead, it’d be more accurate to think of her practice as a sensory archive composed of objects that emerge through an intuitive tracing of memory and interpretation. The seven pieces included in Immanent Infinite offer us a view of memory as a form of knowledge that has been carried through a particular body, thought’s immateriality rendered sensual and experiential.
Arai’s latest work is the result of study in craft and long histories of cultural expression, which are brought together in her hands as a fabric of continual becoming. An array of disparate artists, writers, and anonymous lineages of makers orbits the exhibition. One such figure is the uniquely brilliant German art historian Aby Warburg (1886–1929), founder of the largely overlooked field of iconology, which studies not so much how different emblems and symbols have been recycled and reinterpreted across time, but how visual forms exist in duration, almost as though through a lifeforce that animates and connects seemingly remote eras and even cultures.
Arai met Warburg across a shared perception: when visiting Florence’s Uffizi Gallery she was captivated by the rich movement of fabrics and gowns in the Renaissance paintings of Sandro Botticelli. Following this interest further, she discovered as essay, from 1893, by the then- unknown Warburg, in which he analyzed in Botticelli’s paintings not the ideal composure of his figures, but a quality of unceasing motion he was able to express through his depiction of fabrics draping from bodies. This mutual fascination between Warburg and Arai, over a century apart, connects them through an aesthetic sensitivity to movement as it elaborates compositional space. And it’s this shared sensory experience that Arai makes central to her new work, which concerns an artwork as a kind of conduit for transmitting living energy through seemingly inert matter as it inhabits the intervals between bodies. It’s a charged inhabitation of betweenness that enfolds bodies in an aesthetic intimacy disobeying the separations we usually experience as space and time, which Warburg beautifully called “empathy.”
It's this spirit of empathic encounter and composition that pervades Immanent Infinite, as Arai’s recent residencies in libraries and studios has led her on a Warbargian journey to discover aesthetic rhymes among different modes of imparting and transcribing motion externalized via craft. Staying with her interest in Botticelli’s fabrics as abstractions of movement otherwise halted by the stillness of the image, the other sources she draws on all involve visual means of modeling movement that only suggest, rather than represent, a body. Gathering these sources as a basis for deriving new creative vocabularies, she’s produced her own empathic field of material interactions, not so much an archive—if this word connotes preservation and stillness—as a choreography.
Across the four larger works of Immanent Infinite, the contours and edges of naturally dyed silk forms are articulated against a ground of stretched linen, sometimes unitary or otherwise patchworked. The eye, which follows the familiar, gravitates at first to itineraries of stitched lines as though reading gestures in a painting. The stitch, only a detail in a larger field of action, indicates the demand of time, both literally and figuratively, as it performs a containment of fabric’s wild animacy. Literally, because Arai’s hand stitching is a slowly methodical, linear and repetitive process marking the work with a discernible grade of measure—a stress, a pace, a tempo. And figuratively, because it endows an otherwise fluid environment with extremity, a record of the hand that navigates a space of open and untamable possibilities—inertias in every direction—native to the conditions of silk. The stitch chronicles limits and fixations. It is the remnant of a body that always intends to reintroduce itself into an environment of flux and virtuality, absent yet present.
If the stitch narrates a plot of presence, it does so as a counterpoint to a more fundamental, and less manageable, compositional element: the fold. Whereas the stitch strives to capture, to fasten a form undergoing change, the fold—the actual agent of generative change in these works—exhibits a variability that coheres as a topography of fossilized energy. In Immanent Infinite, the fold is the memory of motion. Arai’s use of silk is not accidental: its distinct unruliness and sensitivity makes it averse to an artwork’s static presentation. Instead, silk maps process and instability, liable to sudden rearrangements and resistant to any finality. Its pleats and billows are an outcome of the material’s intrinsic dynamic of change, of form manifest in folding and unfolding currents. A kind of silken pulse and arrythmia imbues these works with an excess that refuses any conformity to the regularity of the stitch. Silk is dispersive and dissipative: spreading, contracting, enfolding and submerging itself. Its motion is dilatory, which Arai makes all the more evident through the stain-like textures of dye and silk paint as they encounter and immerse one another.
With the show’s three smaller works, another counter-rhythm: drawing, rather than painting becomes the reference. But again, Arai’s material choices and application subvert any expectations of the genre. Tempos and textures are inverted, contrasted, and ultimately harmonized. If the drawn line typically indicates speed, imprinting ambient ground with the velocity of a figure, here the line emerges via accretion and slowness. As though realizing a circular temporality in the creative process of these works, Arai’s line is both beginning and end. Amending the traditionally rigid Japanese Katazome style, a glue-based resist technique for painting fabrics, in Arai’s work the process achieves a freely expressive quality. Unlike a conventionally drawn line, Arai’s line arrives through reversal, the outcome of a resist process that first delineates the more fluid fields of the silk paint, leaving behind only empty contours and boundaries. Then, as a final procedure, she applies oil paint to what were previously relief lines. The binary of negative and positive mark marking is inverted and undone, just as the assumed separation between figure and ground gives way to entanglement. In this way, these works are all about how adjacent forces shape and mold nearby forms. The line, then, offers one trajectory among a latent potentiality of the many, the infinite, which loops, mixes, and knots into singular vantages within a larger, still unfolding whole.
If bodies—the figure, the subject—are largely evacuated or repressed in the works of Immanent Infinite, in favor of the active fields of motion that influence and condition them, they are never wholly absent. “Craft,” writes the poet Lisa Robertson, “refuses bodily disappearance.” And so in Arai’s work the body is made present again at either end of the exhibition, in the form of a collaborative video work with the movement artist Ayano Elson. In Prologue and Epilogue—really one work that holds within its seam the entire exhibition—Elson lends her own craft of attention to the animate possibilities of Arai’s choreographies of silk. Through the empathic force of aesthetic performance, no energy is ever lost to the inertness of an object. The body becomes the instrument of craft once again, all of memory the resource that art offers in a continual process of renewal.
Michael Cavuto is a poet and arts worker who lives in Queens. His first book, Country Poems (Knife Fork Book), was published in 2020 and a second book, Pyre, is forthcoming in spring 2025 from Spiral Editions. His writing has appeared most recently in DiSonare, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Brooklyn Rail. He is a founding editor for the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter and auric press.