Love Bench Project
Public Art Project

Following my time both living in Berlin and taking residence at Irish Museum of Modern Art my impression of western society is that its population is more comfortable with expressing its sexual identity to the public than Japanese society. My idea was, if I install special benches, which are suitable for heterosexual, gay and lesbian couples in the public spaces of Museum, I was curious as to how people would use these benches. This project is an experimental public project, which will develop depending on people’s reactions.

IKEMOKU
Interactive Installation

IKEMOKU was the project that took place twice in front of the Statue of Moyai at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, a popular meeting place. While waiting, many people smoke. However, there was no ashtray around there for some reason.   Masuyama had an idea to create a new styled ashtray with lots of spines to put cigarette butts so that he could provide smokers a modest pleasure for a moment when they had to kill time.

The work was titled Ike-moku Project , which was named after “Ike-bana” (Japanese traditional flower arrangement) and “Shike-moku” (a cigarette butt in Japanese ). Ike-moku Project is a project to try to harmonize a concept of Ike-bana - creating art by putting flowers into the needles of a base - with a concept of ashtray.

In order to encourage people to put a cigarette butt on the object , Masuyama stuck ten of dummy cigarettes on it.   As a result of that, people understand such a strange, unknown and unidentified object as an ashtray and started to put butts into a spine as he expected.   It was a multiplier effect that the more cigarettes were put on it, the more the object looked like an ashtray.   Naturally enough, smokers started gathering around the Ike-moku.

Eventually, almost all smokers there put a cigarette butt on Ike-moku without wondering why they were doing so.   In about five hours, Ike-moku Project was finished with 55 cigarette butts when the work was removed due to rain.

http://www.adngaleria.com/EN/artistas/shiro_masuyama/shiro_obra.htm