Aki Kondo

Mogeji's Journey

Mogeji’s Journey (2014) depicts three hand painted stills from an animated sequence in Aki Kondo’s film Hikari (Light) (2015). Kondo’s film tells the story of a young woman named Juneko who discovers that she is terminally ill and the ways that this impacts her lover, a painter, who tries to reconnect with her by painting her portrait from memory. As Juneko becomes sicker, her hair begins to fall out, a symptom of her unnamed illness. As her condition deteriorates, the film toggles back and forth with the animated story of Mogeji, a white strand of hair inhabiting Juneko’s body who becomes anthropomorphized through Kondo’s animation and recounts his own story of mortality and loss. The three canvases that comprise Mogeji’s Journey depict their own miniaturized narrative: Mogeji’s recounting of his personal story to a younger strand of hair, his sadness at recognizing his inevitable decline, and his descent into the unknown as he falls off Juneko’s body. Rendered with broadly expressive brushstrokes in a whimsically cartoonish style, Kondo draws on trenchant metaphors around vulnerability by focusing on how hair effectively “dies” as soon it is born. Reframed in the context of Kondo’s larger film project, Mogeji’s Journey becomes a far more serious and poetic meditation on the limits of inhabiting a human body and the inexorable “journey” towards the light that we all must take.