For his first public project in the United States, Nishi chose the famous statue of Christopher Columbus in America. The marble statue was designed by Italian sculptor Gaetano Russo and mounted on a granite column, the total height of the monument is more than 75 feet (22.86 meters). The statue was unveiled in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the shores of America.
Regular readers of Forum City will be interested to know that Tatzu Nishi was born in 1960 in Nagoya, Japan. From 1981 to 1984 he studied at Musashino Art University, the highest art school in the city of Kodaira, in the prefecture of the Japanese capital, Tokyo. He then moved to Germany and entered the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where many world-renowned artists studied at the time – Gerhard Richter, Siegman Polke, Josef Beuys and Andreas Gursky.
Here are just a few of his famous projects – Villa Victoria (2002), a temporary hotel around the statue of Queen Victoria at the Biennale in Liverpool, UK; an imaginary studio apartment on the roof of a 14th century cathedral in Basel, Switzerland. At the 2011 Biennale in the city-state of Singapore, he built a temporary luxury hotel around the famous Merlion fountain.
Those who want to see the statue of Columbus up close can also enjoy a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan and the city park – special viewing platforms have been made for that. According to a competent representative of the city’s Public Art Foundation, the original exhibition by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi was visited by some 80,000 New Yorkers and tourists in its first two weeks of operation.
What inspired Tatzu Nishi, a renowned Japanese artist, to create the Columbus statue or his installation “Discovering the New World”?
Tatzu Nishi was inspired to create the Columbus statue installation “Discovering the New World” by his interest in blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces. He wanted to challenge the traditional notion of monumental statues by placing Columbus in a domestic environment, thereby inviting people to interact with and experience the statue in a more intimate way. Nishi’s installation encourages viewers to see familiar objects from a new perspective, provoking thoughts about history, cultural symbols, and the impact of colonization. By taking a familiar figure out of its usual context, Nishi invites us to question and reinterpret our understanding of iconic landmarks.