NOBUMICHI TOSA'S nerdy, wacky persona is a good indicator of where his art unit Maywa Denki is at. Underneath his bulky lab technician's suit, Tosa wears the Japanese white-collar worker's usual shirt and tie. Paired with heavy black glasses and floppy hair, his look is off-kilter retro.
But the Maywa Denki founder says his idiosyncratic style is just 'cosplay' - costume play. 'It's a strange mix of bourgeoisie and proletariat. This uniform is my identity,' Tosa says. 'Sometimes, I even wear it in daily life.'
The 39-year-old was in town last week to open an exhibition of his creations, Nonsense Machines: Naki, at a fashion chain gallery. And nonsense is an apt way to describe his work. He's artist, engineer, performer and composer, all rolled into one.
In the 1990s, he paired with brother Masamichi as Maywa Denki and made their name creating a fantasy electrical world which pokes sly humour at modern life. Among their creations: a foetus doll that moves by pulling on an attached pistol, an extension cord shaped like a fish skeleton, a cage fitted with needles that drops into a pan of fish whenever a phone rings, and a toy vehicle that is activated by the swimming motion of fish in an attached container.
While his brother has since quit, Tosa continues to win plaudits for his odd blend of performance art and technology, and local audiences will get a taste of his zany appeal at concerts next month.
At a Paris show in 2004, he appeared with a set of self-playing drums, bass and guitar. Also in the array of remote-controlled 'instruments' were marimba shaped like flowers, shoes set up to produce tap-dance rhythms, and a fishbone-shaped xylophone which lit up a series of bulbs as it was played.
