ACT 2023 Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 5th edition - Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui, Sudo Misa
Ungraspable
Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo
11 February – 26 March 2023
Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) presents a series of exhibitions “ACT (Artists Contemporary TOKAS)” since 2019 that showcase noteworthy efforts by mainly artists who have previously participated in other TOKAS programs. This fifth edition, featuring Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui and Sudo Misa, aims to capture invisible presence, and evoke on various scales relationships between substance and imagination regarding such things. This time, Ebihara presents freeze frames from videos; Samejima historical materials related to ancient ruins; and Sudo works based on space observation data. All of them are visualizations of fragmentary moments and phenomena, capturing things that we can perceive but not recognize, things that have gotten lost, or things that we will never be able to see, while inviting our imagination to the vast expanses of space and time that each of them involves. Assembled in physical creation processes, the works indicate the respective artist’s ideas and abundant imagination, while at once reminding us of the feelings of curiosity, admiration or fear, that we potentially harbor toward things that are remote from ourselves. The works by the three artists featured here are informed by different viewpoints and techniques, but they all work as harbingers of the invisible presence that lurks behind them.
EBIHARA Yasushi
Ebihara Yasushi has been exploring the fleetingness of mass-consumed subjects and fading memories, by various means including painting, sculpture, photography and performance. His voluminous output amazes through its great stylistic diversity, as can be observed in the “LUST” series of delicate depictions of intricately tangled hair representing the mess of worldly desires; the “Macaulay Culkin” series of paintings as epitomes of beauty consumed as the personified social ideal; and the “Garden” series capturing transformations of the landscape through memories of garden plants around the house of the artist’s parents.
The “Noise” series that is showcased at this exhibition, consists of oil paintings of movie scenes captured in freeze frames from video tapes. While being still images disturbed by scanning lines, in which movies – that normally play as sequences of fragments – are fixed at one point as if time itself had been detained, the pictures are charged with a sense of movement. The painted faces of actresses and sceneries are disconnected from the respective original story, and certainly evoke different images in different viewers. By demonstrating that movies contain moments that are not consciously perceived, the works remind us of the fact that only a tiny fraction of the things we see also in daily life, is stored in our awareness and our memory, while making us travel back and forth in the chaos of vanishing and multiplying images.
Ebihara Yasushi was born in 1976 in Ibaraki. Lives and works in Ibaraki. Graduated with an MFA from Tokyo University of Arts in 2001. Recent exhibitions: “Handsome Men They Are,” The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama / The Shimane Arts Center, 2021, “garden,” KEN NAKAHASHI, Tokyo, 2021, “Colors,” Wada Fine Arts, Tokyo, 2021, “Sing,” KEN NAKAHASHI, Tokyo, 2019, “BONDAGE CULKIN,” Art Bar Hoshio, Tokyo, 2019. Awards: “GEISAI#10,” GIANT ROBOT Award, 2010, “Epson Color Imaging Contest,” Special Award, 2006.
SAMEJIMA Yui
Since ancient times, humans have been believing in “things that aren’t visible to the eye” but that can be perceived sensuously, as expressed in worship of nature or animism. Interested in such spiritual notions, Samejima focuses in her creative work on paintings themed on connections between “visible things” and “invisible things,” or visualizations of the boundary between the two realms.
The centerpiece of this exhibition is the “Yobitsugi” series of paintings that the artist has been working on in recent years. Here she orchestrates the exhibition space with a diverse array of works themed on ancient ruins, tools that are no longer used, tradition and occultism. Originally, “yobitsugi” is a technique of refurbishing broken vessels using lacquer and gold, and replacing missing parts with pieces from other vessels. The artist applies this technique to painting, where she conjures up things that aren’t actually depicted, from patchworks of images with different historical and narrative connotations within each work. She often uses irregularly shaped canvases that again look like fragments of something larger, and that she combines into arrangements of yet different dimensions. For depictions of objects that she can’t actually touch, such as relics or statements, she creates small sculptures that she refers to as “yobishiro (objects that divine spirits reside in)” This is how Samejima attempts to capture the spirits that reside in these things, and translate her physical interpretations of them into two-dimensional renditions.
Samejima Yui was born in 1988 in Kyoto. Lives and works in Kyoto. Graduated with a BA in Printmaking from Kyoto Seika University in 2010. Samejima Yui participated in “TWS-Emerging 2013” at Tokyo Arts and Space. Recent exhibitions: “Methodology to connect to ∃,” TENSHADAI, Kyoto, 2022, “Blue Period Exhibition / BLUE ART COLLABORATION,” Terada Warehouse, Tokyo, 2022, “Fragments of unvoiced voices,” KATSUYA SUSUKI GALLERY, Tokyo, 2022, “UMEKOUJI MEETINGS Vol.00,” Kagan Hotel, Kyoto, 2021, “tangled rūpa,” GALLERY VALEUR, Nagoya, 2021. Recent award: “NONIO ART WAVE AWARD 2021,” GRAND-PRIX, NONIO Award, 2021.
SUDO Misa
Inspired by her interest in astronomical observation and mythology, Sudo attempts to express in her works the “universe” as something that is difficult to grasp, while reducing her distance from it, through pictures from outer space and motifs related to astronomy. Her creative activities revolve around the creation of works for which she punches countless holes into sheets of paper using pins, illuminating which makes images of stars, planets and galaxies emerge.
Phenomena that occur in outer space, we cannot easily grasp within our daily life activities. The space that Sudo depicts through the small operations of her hands, however, presents itself with a sense of touch and gravity. Appearing quite differently depending on the directions and angles of the light, and the little elevations and undulations on the back side of the paper that occur when punching holes into it, the works illustrate an unfathomable cosmic energy. When paying attention to the irregularities and slits resulting from single-mindedly piercing the paper with sharp tools, contrary to the mysterious cosmic impressions, these parts make us feel the roughness and ruggedness of the universe, along with a sense of fear. In addition to X-ray images taken by the Orbiting Solar Observatory “Hinode,” in this exhibition Sudo unveils an installation combining motifs including the Sun, Saturn and Milky Way, based on interviews with researchers and collected data. As a whole, the exhibition invites visitors to discover the minute characteristic distinctions between the stars by observing the individual works on display.
Sudo Misa was born in 1982. Lives and works in Saitama. Graduated with an MA in Art Education from SAITAMA University in 2007. Sudo Misa participated in “TWS-Emerging 2015” at Tokyo Arts and Space. Recent exhibitions: “The stars that go around,” SYP GALLERY, Tokyo, 2022, “Art Studio on a Star,” Gallery Saikousha, studio study/Saikousha Institute of Art, Saitama, 2020, SUPER OPEN STUDIO “Nora no Tsukiatari,” STUDIO ISSEI, Tokyo, 2019, “In My Room, Into SPACE,” S.Y.P Art Space, Tokyo, 2018, “Suruganokuni Art Festival, FUJINOYAMA BIENNALE 2016,” Old Igarashi House, Shizuoka.
TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS
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ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 5 “Ungraspable”
Updated 18-02-2025
