Takahiro Morita "Freehand" exhibition recap + interview

[silhouette]

http://liveskateboardmedia.com/en/article/takahiro-morita-freehand-5-ws

Morita being Morita. If you can't recall, he's the man behind Overground Broadcasting (and if you can't recall Overground Broadcasting, well...).

I like this part of the interview:

"Essentially the lines of skaters that get hooked with momentary pleasure is something you can't see. But by drawing them with dynamic lines, people can see the speed, aggression, emotional ups and downs and amount of heat. By doing so, viewers can imagine the actual skating and it would be possible to convey the appeal of skateboarding in many ways.
 
The reason I chose "FREEHAND" as the title is because I wanted to express the freedom of my skateboarding as well as my feelings and emotions. I made this exhibition to convey my aesthetics and also freedom, depth and appeal of skateboarding."

Reluctance to reveal the meaning of the black balls because it would limit one's imagination reminded me of Gonz.

[SLAPASONIC]

Saw this on insta today, fucking cool concept.

Honestly, I feel like Takahiro Morita shouldn't be compared to the Gonz.

The man seems to have a much more concrete vision of what he wants and does. While the Gonz has a really free spirit and ambiguous take on skateboarding and art, there's so much to the artistic side of skating with Gonz I feel like I don't relate to him on at all, and also feel like the Gonz gets away with things that pretty much no other skater would, and rightfully so since he's the Gonz. Some of his exhibition type demos to me seem very, very absurd. Enjoyable, but I just don't get it, I enjoy the spirit of doing whatever the fuck you want, we all have that, but beyond that it feels baseless.

Takahiro Morita is his own individual, the Gonz just seems like a child doing whatever he wants. FEN/LIBE is more of a skateboarding movement rooted in skateboarding and Japanese culture, and Takahiro Morita embodies that as an artistic culture. As a skateboarder I fucking love the Gonz, as an eccentric or an artist, I don't really understand him.

[Mcfctid]

I always thought Morita was the personification of an anime character

[silhouette]

Saw this on insta today, fucking cool concept.

Honestly, I feel like Takahiro Morita shouldn't be compared to the Gonz.

The man seems to have a much more concrete vision of what he wants and does. While the Gonz has a really free spirit and ambiguous take on skateboarding and art, there's so much to the artistic side of skating with Gonz I feel like I don't relate to him on at all, and also feel like the Gonz gets away with things that pretty much no other skater would, and rightfully so since he's the Gonz. Some of his exhibition type demos to me seem very, very absurd. Enjoyable, but I just don't get it, I enjoy the spirit of doing whatever the fuck you want, we all have that, but beyond that it feels baseless.

Takahiro Morita is his own individual, the Gonz just seems like a child doing whatever he wants. FEN/LIBE is more of a skateboarding movement rooted in skateboarding and Japanese culture, and Takahiro Morita embodies that as an artistic culture. As a skateboarder I fucking love the Gonz, as an eccentric or an artist, I don't really understand him.

I get what you mean, I think you might be underestimating Morita's spontaneity though. Both Gonz's and Morita's respective wild insanities get filtered, just through different prisms, Gonz's being the standards of what the western culture will consider acceptable when Morita's is by the standards of the eastern culture. In the end they look like they speak a different language, but I think they are both just as free-spirited. They just grew up in areas of the world where the definitions of the sketchy, provocative shit you can do to get attention and more or less be tolerated for are different, the codes and social boundaries (and work ethics) are different, but essentially they both just really want to be able to do whatever they want in life, creating non stop and clinging to a certain youthful energy. I really think Morita might be the closest mind to Gonz's, although just stepping in his footsteps. Morita also gets away with a lot no one else would be able to pull off, too; and even fails at times, as he is far less popular amidst the Japanese skate scene as he looks like he is from our embellished western perspective - a lot of them consider him too eccentric. But I think they are spiritually very close, everything just happens to translate differently depending on where in the world we are from.

It's good to get to have this discussion on here.

This is one of my favorite Morita clips: