"We cannot hear the sound of an ancient national treasure instrument encased in a glass display."

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roar of shin ku is an installation work from Hiroshi Mehata’s early career, exploring the transformation of culture through the "loss of information" and the subsequent "human imagination" that fills those voids.
In the 2010s, as the rise of social media began to accelerate the fragmentation of information, cultural contexts were stripped away, leaving only isolated signs to be consumed. This work traces the "broken telephone" effect of an Indonesian Gamelan ritual as it travels across time and space to Japan. Through this journey, its original meaning and form are distorted, eventually devolving into a fragmented memory: "an assortment of bowl-like objects being struck in a ritualistic manner."
The installation reconstructs the Gamelan using mundane Japanese materials: plastic "lacquer-style" tableware, a scattered multitude of bells, and calligraphic strokes representing the form of a forest. By presenting this "fake Japan" at the Jogja National Museum—the heart of Gamelan culture—the work acts as a mirror. It challenges the audience to recognize that the stereotypes we hold of "tradition" or "Japanese-ness" are often nothing more than an accumulation of creative misinterpretations.
For modern Japanese people, "tradition" is as distant in time as Indonesia is in space; we are all, in a sense, outsiders to our own history.
The "Roar" in the title refers to the deafening noise of imagination that resonates within the "Vacuum" (the silence of the missing original). Drawing from his background in free improvisation, Mehata finds a unique beauty in this "displacement". The work suggests that in the gap between the original and the interpretation, a new, distorted myth is born—one that reflects the profound estrangement we feel toward our own cultural origins.