Sky Garden #2

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We went to the top of one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo on a SAS trip on the second day.  That was how I got to Tokyo, and I just stayed there afterward – the building was the last stop.  We went all the way to the top again and looked out the observation deck.  Again, it was pretty gaudy and nice, but it was nice to look around and sit and enjoy the view and not be cold for a while.

 

Our ticket said we could go to the observation deck as well as an art exhibit that they had up there too.  So after Noor and I had enjoyed the views for long enough, we started looking for the art exhibit, and eventually found it.  The theme was supposed to be something about art and beauty and life and death and our fear of aging or something along those lines.  In general I didn’t really like it, I thought a lot of it was not-art or was so ridiculous and required so much explanation that it just defeated the purpose of art in the first place.

 

But there were a few cool pieces.

 

One of them was called “Jubilee,” and it was supposed to be the “ultimate party dress.”  At first glance, I couldn’t tell anything was up with it.  It just looked like a nice dress with a pretty pink part at the top and a glittery frilly poofy part at the bottom with some stones woven into it.  Then later, someone told me that they weren’t stone.  It was 6,500 birth control pills still in their packages.  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it, but it was seriously amazing.  Not only was the idea fairly cool, but the workmanship was seriously impressive.

 

There was another whole gallery that maybe you’ve heard of before, and I forget exactly the name, but I think it was called “Death after Life” or something along those lines.  Each work had two huge pictures in black and white with just a face and a black background.  Each set of two pictures were of the same person.  They looked pretty much the same in both, except for maybe they’d fallen asleep in the second.  The whole point, though, was that the second picture was of them immediately after they had been pronounced dead.  It was pretty chilling.  They looked so close to alive, and sometimes even just like they were alive and only asleep, but they weren’t.

 

You should really look for it.  It was really crazy.