Saatchi gallery: SELECTED WORKS BY SOHEI NISHINO

If there were a presiding spirit over Nishino’s dioramas, it would have to be Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo, guiding us through Invisible Cities where the imagination takes over the job of urban planning from the rational architects and administrators. If anything, we are over-mapped today. Anyone with a screen can in a matter of seconds hone in on a country, a city, a street, a house, a doorway. It’s magic of a kind, I suppose, but then why does it so quickly wear off? Where is the wonder we feel when looking at medieval maps, when cartographers felt justified in filling terra incognita with imaginary islands and two headed-men?