Through his glorious tangle of color and motion Kengo Kito has offered an oversized ravel of joy with Reconnecting (2021) a fascinating and immersive installation of hula-hoop spirals that fill the gallery and immerse the spectator. On view at Japan House in Hollywood, it is a delightful antidote to the divisions and lockdowns of 2020.

For this site-specific installation the Japanese artist has chosen neon-colored hula hoops as his sculptural medium. Kito opens the hoops and links them end-to-end in brilliantly colored coils. Yet the work presents them not as mere tangles—they are an enveloping wriggle, as if part of a living organism—its sinews, its veins, its connective tissue.

The exhibition unfolds in halves. Portions of the work are in both the front window and an area visible within the store, among books and information referring to the work and its ideas. Videos offer a detailed look at the complex process involved in creating the installation, which due to the pandemic was created remotely. In positioning each element Kito operated the visual technology that directed US-based installers. After this engrossing introduction the viewer enters the main installation, at the end of a wide U-shaped gallery.

Kengo Kito, Reconnecting, 2021. Courtesy Japan House.

The artist says the work is his response to a “yearning to reconnect” experienced by individuals isolated over the last 18 months. His first exhibition in the US, the work revels in its interconnected theme as well as Kito’s use of repurposed, common objects. He also explores Japanese philosophic concepts as this work creates “a visual expression of the idea that our world is made up of “connections.” Shaping long lines from the opened hula hoops, Kito forms varied circles, arcs and twists that cross and intersect. The large-scale exhibition seems to vibrate with life, as if the opened hoops spiraled energy through their conduits. 

On a prosaic level, audiences may simply enjoy the candy colors and interplay of a gallery filled with vivid plastic shapes and how much space remains—enhanced through mirrors at the far end of the expansive main gallery—waiting to be filled and fulfilled by the additional connective energy of viewers’ presence. Conversely, along with a sense of vibrating energy, the installation also exudes a sense of quiet wonder. Kito refers to traditional Zen Buddhist beliefs: the circle is both whole and empty. Contemplating emptiness is not about loneliness, rather, but about receptivity, of waiting to be full.

Kito makes it easy to consider this contemplative notion while still serving up an engaging, involving, and just plain fun installation—and the resonance of simply being alive that forms connection between all living things. In viewing the massive work, which employs more than 2,000 hula hoops, one can almost forget that the hoops are merely plastic coils and not alive themselves.

Did the artist perhaps, in creating the installation, imbue them with a kind of kinetic lifeforce? Or maybe that is simply the viewer’s imagination.