Marion Paquette, Shikichi Osamu, Shoji Asami @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2025 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 7th Edition - "Plural Body/ies" Exhibition

ACT 2025 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 7th Edition - Marion Paquette, Shikichi Osamu, Shoji Asami

Plural Body/ies 

複数形の身体 

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

22 February - 23 March 2025

― Examining contemporary society based on the plurality of the body/ies

It is said that, of the approximately 8 billion people that inhabit the earth today, we get in contact with a total of about 30,000 – or 0.000375% of the earth’s population – in our lifetime. When imagining all the people on the planet that we don’t and will never know, we realize the immense scale of human existence, that exceeds by far what we can grasp with our own bodily senses. This exhibition is themed around the plurality of the human body, which is also what the creative work of the three featured artists – Marion PAQUETTE, SHIKICHI Osamu, SHOJI Asami is derived from. The body that transforms through relationships with others; the body that is multiplied in the virtual space; or human society as one collective body – these are some of the various positions from which visitors are invited to explore the properties and possibilities of the “body” in the present age.

Our body is built to functions as an organ by which we perceive the world around us. Every single one of us is a subject that generates communication, recognizes the people around, and builds relationships with them.

But why is it that human existence comes with not only one, but multiple “bodies”? One thing that facilitates the plural nature of the body, are its reproductive functions. A human is always born from multiple other bodies, and for about 200,000 years since Homo sapiens is said to have emerged, history unfurled as a string of countless interactions between one human body and another.

At the same time, advanced medical technology has enabled us to extract such individual human body parts as organs or blood, and transplant them into the bodies of people in need of those specific parts. In other words, it is possible to manipulate living bodies to integrate parts of multiple bodies of other human beings. The pervasion of digital technologies in everyday life promoted the virtual multiplication of individual bodies, whereas images of avatars or bodies modified using apps, for example, assume multiple identities through various aspects on levels other than physical reality .

This exhibition focusing on the plural existence(s) of (the) human body/ies, features works by Marion Paquette, Shikichi Osamu,and Shoji Asami, three artists who examine in their respective works the mutual bodily relationships between human individuals. Considering his dance as a form of communication at a stage prior to verbal formulation, Shikichi pursues ways of transferring and internalizing sensations generated through interactions between individuals, into other bodies. Shoji translates the worlds that she explores with her body into painted spaces, to create works that viewers are to experience in a way as if moving back and forth between their own and the artist’s body. Paquette’s creations are collective structures that incorporate human individuals in coexistence and interaction with each other, constructing spaces where the boundaries between private and public are blurred. Each focusing on the delicate relationships between individual bodies that continue to affect one another, the three artists create works that project the plural nature of the human body, remind us of the imaginative faculty and sensibility as its fundamental abilities, and inspire us to envision new possible ways of extending/expanding it into different forms of “bodies.”

ACT (Artists Contemporary TOKAS) is a special exhibition introducing artists who practice notable activities, including those who have previously participated in other Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) programs.

Marion PAQUETTE

Marion Paquette participated in “Quebec-Tokyo Exchange Residency Program” (2023) at the Tokyo Arts and Space. In their artistic practice, Paquette creates interfaces and situations through which they explore the delicate relationships between bodies, spaces and objects. Their typical work is a soft sculpture made from textile, paper or other material with a plastic quality, that visualizes the physical transformations and behaviors that are triggered by the interrelations between one’s own singular body and the bodies of those around. Inspired by their interest in the “social body” that emerges in the space between private and public, Paquette also creates works that, with the various playful ideas they incorporate, encourage physical interventions by passersby at public places. During their stay in 2023 as part of a TOKAS residency program, Paquette conducted research into the phenomenon of “inemuri” (dozing) that can be observed at public spaces in Japan, and eventually created “inemuri · 居眠り· dormir présent·e,” a mobile private recreation space that people can take with them wherever they go. Proposing a form of private space that is temporarily set up in a public environment, the work creates situations in which the social body suddenly transforms into a private one.

In this exhibition, Marion Paquette presents a large-scale installation that was inspired by a mycelium structure of fungi that serve as a foundation for ecosystems of living organisms. Unfolding across the entire exhibition space, the work comprises approximately 45 objects made from recycled cloth taken from actual sails that the artist was given by friends back home in Montreal. Visitors are free to walk into the work, and through that physical action, loosely connect the pieces of cloth that have traveled all the way from Canada, along with the personal stories that are contained in every one of them. Just like humans have identified connections between stars in the night sky in the forms of constellations with certain added meanings, through devices that build connections between individual human beings, Marion Paquette reconsiders through their creative work the collective body that is human society. Their performance is scheduled for the closing day of the exhibition.

Marion Paquette was born in Montreal in 1992. Lives and works in Montreal. Graduated with a BA in Visual and Media Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal in 2015. Recent exhibitions: “inemuri 居眠りdormir présent·e,” Occurrence espace d'art et d'essai contemporains, Montreal, 2024, “Fil · Flux · Figments,” Livart, Montreal, 2024, “Mur Mitoyen,” Espace Transmission, curators Clara and Alexis Cousineau, Montreal, 2023, “entre bleu," Vrille art actuel, La Pocatiere, 2023, “bleu de lieu,” Fondation PHI pour l’art contemporain, Montreal, 2022. 

SHIKICHI Osamu

Shikichi Osamu participated in “OPEN SITE 6” (2021) at the Tokyo Arts and Space. Shikichi explores ways of grasping one’s own body and its “reality” as things that are impossible to perceive objectively from the outside, by way of interacting with other people in our immediate, material environment. Revolving around a central axis of choreography and dance, his works incorporate elements of performance, sculpture, video art, etc., realized through creative processes in which the artist blurs identification methods related to the human body, in order to reconfigure the mechanism of physical perception at large. In the works in the “blooming dots” series that he has been working on continuously since 2020, he uses a smartphone – an indispensable daily life tool for us today, almost like an additional body part – as a “third eye,” to explore the new body languages that emerge when transforming oneself into what seems like someone else’s body, and thereby establishing a “new body that belongs to everyone and no-one.” At the same time, Shikichi focuses also on the physical sensation itself that is spawned through such kinds of interactions, visualizing especially the so-called “autonomous sensory meridian response” (ASMR) – a pleasantly tingling sensation in response to audio-visual stimulation – through forms of movement charged with what he refers to as “WET” (weird erotic tension).

The subject of Shikichi’s work at this exhibition is the Noh play “Izutsu,” in which a woman sees a reflection of herself in the water of a well, wearing her deceased husband’s attire, and performs a dance while imagining his face and remembering the days they spent together. Shikichi translates the story into a performative installation, identifying the woman’s dance with a sensual “lap dance” that is performed for one specific person, based on his own texts related to choreography. Shikichi will also show a performance during the exhibition period.

Shikichi Osamu was born in Saitama in 1994. Lives and works in Brussels and Tokyo. Graduated with P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Training Cycle) in 2024 (dance), and an MA in Film and New Media from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2020. Recent exhibitions: “ ユアファントムアイ、アワクリスタライズペイン / ur phantom eyes, our crystalized pains,” Kaaistudios, Brussels, 2024, “unisex #01,” Camping Asia, Taipei, 2023, “Hyper Ambient Club 'My lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made',” Creative Center Osaka (CCO), 2023, “Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror,” gallery αM, Tokyo, 2022, “BankART Under 35 2021 'ama phantom',” BankART KAIKO, Yokohama, 2021. Recent awards: “Grants for Overseas Study by Young Artists,” Pola Art Foundation, 2023, “Yokohama Dance Collection 2020," French Embassy Award for Young Choreographers.

SHOJI Asami

Shoji Asami participated in “TOKAS-Emerging 2016” at the Tokyo Arts and Space. Considering her human body as “the origin of painting,” Shoji has been exploring in her work the physical image and sensation that arises through the experience of “viewing a painting.” Her work at large is characterized by an approach of painting intuitively without defining beforehand what the finished painting will look like, using mainly semitransparent acrylic panels and canvases as support media. She usually begins by drawing a single line without doing any prior sketching, and applies paint, only to remove the paint again by wiping it away. She then gives herself to the image that instinctively appears in her mind in the process, picks up the brush once again to paint, then removes the paint again… It is a cyclic repetition of physical actions, during which the painting gradually takes shape. Birds and other animals, nude human figures, transparent bodies with their bones exposed, and various other images that are coincidentally born in the painted spaces from the strokes of her arms, are all manifestations of the artist herself that exist alongside her actual body. Charged with swirling primitive impulse and emotion, her paintings show human figures with arms opened wide as if offering their body to someone else, or touching each other’s faces with their hands or cheeks, adding a vague sense of affection that stirs the viewer’s senses.

Shoji’s exhibition this time comprises several dozen new works including oil paintings, around a series of drawings as a centerpiece. Scheduled for the opening day is a performance in which the artist paints the window of the exhibition venue, as part of the artist’s attempt to travel back and forth between her body in the painter’s position, and those in the paintings that she makes.

Shoji Asami was born in Fukushima in 1988. Lives and works in Tokyo. Graduated with an MA in Printmaking course from Tama Art University Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2012. Recent exhibitions: “MOT ANNUAL 2024 'on the imagined terrain',” Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2024, “October, Much Ado About Nothing,” Semiose, Paris, 2024, “A Stranger’s Tales” Independent Art Fair with LINSEED, New York, 2024, “a Gait Without Foot,” gallery21yo-j,Tokyo, 2023, “Body, Love, Gender,” Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea, 2023, “Yearning for Vision,” Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa, and others, 2023. Recent awards: “The 31st Gotoh Memorial Cultural Award,” Newcomer's Prize of Art, 2020, “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2015,” Tokyo Wonder Wall Prize, 2015, Selected, “The 18th Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art” (participated as art unit, Conceptual Architect), 2015.

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

PREVIOUS EDITIONS OF ACT - ARTISTS CONTEMPORARY TOKAS @ TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE, ON WANAFOTO:

1st Edition - ACT 2019 - Artists: Sato Masaharu, Nishimura Yu, Yoshigai Nao

2nd Edition - ACT 2020 - Artists: Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, Watanabe Go

3rd Edition - ACT 2021 - Artists: Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, Watanabe Go

4th Edition - ACT 2022 - Artists: Saito Haruka, Nakazawa Daisuke, Yuasa Ebosi

5th Edition - ACT 2023 - Artists: Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui, Sudo Misa

6th Edition - ACT 2024 - Artists: Ohba Takafumi, Suga Yushi, YOF = Yanagawa Tomoyuki + Ohara Takayoshi + Furusawa Ryu

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 7  "Plural Body/ies"

Updated 18-02-2025

Ohba Takafumi, Suga Yushi, YOF = Yanagawa Tomoyuki + Ohara Takayoshi + Furusawa Ryu @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2024 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 6th Edition - "Layers of Optical Experience" Exhibition

ACT 2024 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 6th Edition - Ohba Takafumi, Suga Yushi, YOF = Yanagawa Tomoyuki + Ohara Takayoshi + Furusawa Ryu

Layers of Optical Experience

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

24 February - 24 March 2024

What you see by standing there…

With the internet pervading every aspect of life, we are bombarded with huge numbers of images on a daily basis. When attending an exhibition, many people have already viewed the works on someone’s social media account, and perhaps even feel as if they have been to the venue before. With increasing opportunities to see art online, it is not always essential to see it in real life. Nonetheless, the thrill and wonder of encountering artworks face to face cannot be fully captured on a screen and remains irreplaceable.

This exhibition features the works of two artists and one group; Ohba Takafumi, Suga Yushi, YOF (Ohara Takayoshi + Furusawa Ryu + Yanagawa Tomoyuki) that visually interpret the structure of cognition in various ways. We encourage you to come to the venue, and experience the many-layered disruptions of technique and structure that emerge when engaging with these works in person.

The two artists and one artist group featured in this exhibition – Ohba Takafumi, Suga Yushi, and YOF – endeavor to visually capture the structure of cognition. Ohba focuses on human memory, creating paintings from photographs in which he employs various methods of making and erasing marks, leaving traces that build up in layers. Suga explores painterly phenomena emanating from the physicality of brushwork and the material nature of the paint, applying paint uniformly on urethane-coated surfaces for a mirror-like finish, then selectively scraping it away and using the removed paint to create complementary works. YOF, a collective of Ohara Takayoshi, Furusawa Ryu, and Yanagawa Tomoyuki, deliver novel optical experiences through exploration and practice involving color and space in visual media, manipulating the emergence of color through the interplay of specialized lighting and spatial design.

These artists’ works please the eye with intricate surfaces and textures, while requiring viewers to move around the venue and adopt different perspectives to apprehend them completely. Viewing the works in person leads to a range of discoveries, and physically engaging with them at length invites reconsideration of the basic act of “seeing an object and recalling a memory.”

The timing and nature of cognition following perception, the formation of memories, and the forging of associations with other events differ from person to person, and the variations among these process are what make our world so multifaceted. We invite you to enjoy these artists’ wide-ranging explorations and innovative creations in person at the exhibition venue.

OHBA Takafumi

Ohba Takafumi explores the cognitive structures of remembering and forgetting, translating these concepts into two-dimensional works. His seemingly simple creations are the result of intricate, multi-layered processes. Working from a photograph, Ohba roughly traces its outlines, then applies layers of mineral pigment using Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) techniques. By brushing water over these pigments, he creates gradations of tones as they dissolve. Subsequently, he adds layers of thin paper, further defining the translucent outlines and rendering parts of the painting three-dimensional. At this stage, Ohba revisits the original image and refers to other photographs of similar scenarios. By selecting images from these photographs and strategically placing them on the canvas, he transcends mere replication of a photograph, bringing landscapes reimagined through the lens of memory to life from his own viewpoint. The application of platinum and aluminum to certain areas of the pale surfaces endows them with varying luminosity.

Having focused thus far on what he deems “ideal landscapes,” Ohba now turns his attention to “false memories” of things that did not actually occur and “appropriated memories” that actually belong to others. He adopts a novel approach, drawing forth new landscapes by manipulating seemingly humdrum photographs taken by acquaintances and interrogating ostensibly shared memories of specific times, all while engaging in dialogues with others.

Born in Osaka in 1988. Lives and works in Hiroshima. Withdrew at the end of the second term of the doctoral program of Hiroshima City University in 2018. Recent exhibitions: “daily scenes,” Cafe and Gallery KANEYA, Shimane, 2022, “False memories of a certain family,” GALLERY RYO, Tokyo, 2022, “biscuit gallery group exhibition ‘re’,” biscuit gallery, Tokyo, 2022. Recent award: “The 72nd Annual Competition of Art in Yamaguchi Prefecture,” Excellent Work Award, Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum, 2019.

SUGA Yushi

Suga Yushi participated in “ TWS -Emerging 2015 ” at Tokyo Arts and Space. The artist explores painterly phenomena emanating from the physicality of brushwork and the material nature of the paint, above and beyond clearly rendered images. He has recently adopted a distinctive style of presentation in which he pairs two works with the same or related motifs, highlighting their contrasts and correlations. Suga begins with a urethane-coated surface for a mirror-like finish and uniformly applies a single shade of paint, then scrapes it away selectively before it dries. He then uses the removed paint to create a companion piece, heightening a sense of duality. His motifs include fictive liminal spaces, designed using 3D computer graphics, and unpopulated landscapes. Lustrous strokes rendered visible by scraping away paint, coupled with the cool glow of the underlying surface, evoking the feelings of tension and emptiness that pervade our uncertain world.

In this exhibition, with the theme of “liminal,” Suga unveils his first installation, displaying the computer-graphic models he depicts alongside his paintings. This series of paintings, created using a range of techniques and manifesting as paired sets, merge reality and fiction. They emerge as a novel mode of expression, occupying the liminal space between media while inseparably uniting them.

Suga Yushi was born in Nagasaki in 1988. Lives and works in Ibaraki. Graduated with an MA in Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017. Recent exhibitions: “liminal,” MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY, Tokyo, 2023, “SUMMER SHOW,” MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY, Tokyo, 2022, “Day dream,” ISETAN SALONE, Tokyo, 2022. Recent award: “The 4th CAF Awards,” Special Jury Prize, 2017.

YOF - Yanagawa Tomoyuki, Ohara Takayoshi, Furusawa Ryu  

The artist collective YOF participated in “OPEN SITE 2019-2020” at Tokyo Arts and Space. YOF, consisting of Ohara Takayoshi, Furusawa Ryu, and Yanagawa Tomoyuki, conducts pragmatic research on color and space and explores the scope of image extension in digital media, thereby interrogating the current state of visual expression. In their 2019 installation 2D Painting, exhibited as part of the TOKAS “OPEN SITE” open call program, they delivered an experience of alternation between two- and three-dimensional perception using strategic lighting of objects with stripped-away textures, negating the depth of the three-dimensional space. YOF’s recent installations include those employing monitors to delve into interplay between the viewer’s gaze and the video space.

In this exhibition, they investigate the inherent conceptual boundaries of objects by creating abrupt visual disconnects between the subjects and their surrounding environments in actual space, much as pictures are incongruously cut and pasted in digital imaging.

YOF is an artist group formed in 2015. OHARA Takayoshi was born in 1986. Graduated with an MA in Film and New Media from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012. FURUSAWA Ryu was born in 1984. Enrolled in the doctoral program of Film and New Media Studies at Tokyo University of the Arts. YANAGAWA Tomoyuki was Born in 1985. Graduated with an MA in Media Creations from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences [IAMAS] in 2013. Recent exhibitions: “Colour and Psyche – Chromatics, where science and aesthetics interplayed of serendipity,” Tokyo Zokei University Art Museum, 2023, “Parallax Void theca 2023ss Exhibition,” theca, Tokyo, 2023, “Flowing Windows, Passing Eyes,” art space kimura ASK?, Tokyo, 2023. Recent award: “The Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators”, 2022.

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 6  "Layers of Optical Experience"

Updated 18-02-2025

Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui, Sudo Misa @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2023 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS, Tokyo - 5th Edition - “Ungraspable” Exhibition

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

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 5 “Ungraspable”

Updated 18-02-2025

Saito Haruka, Nakazawa Daisuke, Yuasa Ebosi @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2022 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 4th Edition - "Approach to Alternative Images" Exhibition

ACT 2022 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 4th Edition  - Saito Haruka, Nakazawa Daisuke, Yuasa Ebosi 

Approach to Alternative Images 

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

5 February – 21 March 2022

Shown at this forth ACT exhibition are works by Saito Haruka, a creator of paintings and installations that incorporate elements of time and space; Nakazawa Daisuke, who is active as a “narrative explorer” and designer; and Yuasa Ebosi, an artist whose work revolves all around a fictitious painter.

The three featured artists attempt in their works to extend certain shared times and spaces, by introducing elements of imagination into events that actually occurred in the past. In the exhibition, Saito and Nakazawa both present new works that were inspired by the history of the TOKAS Hongo building, which was constructed in 1928, while Yuasa presents paintings by a fictitious artist of that time. By linking past events to the present, these works expose the structure of the human society that we are part of, while at once presenting alternative perspectives on the world. Unfolding on the stage of the TOKAS Hongo building, which has itself seen a variety of human individuals come and go as time moved on from the Showa to the Reiwa era, the exhibition aims to inspire visitors to think again about what they see here and now, by connecting to things that once existed there and then.

SAITO Haruka

Based on her understanding of the concept of time as an aggregation of changes triggered by the kinetic energy of objects, Saito Haruka creates paintings and installations in which various events are linked to temporal and spatial structures. Through these works in which she captures things that occurred around her, the artist attempts to manipulate time in the space that the viewer perceives.

In this exhibition, she presents a video installation themed around the transformations of the TOKAS Hongo building, from the delayed construction works to the damage it suffered during the air raids of 1945. Images of the building’s temporal and spatial developments through the stages of construction, devastation and restoration, are accompanied by spoken words, and wind generated through the movements of objects.

Saito Haruka was born in Nagano in 1988. Lives and works in Tokyo. Graduated with a BA in Oil Painting from Tama Art University in 2011. Recent exhibitions: “Group Show of Contemporary Artists 2020 ‘Sunburn After Swimming in the Painted Pool’,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, “Sleeping While Standing / Speaking While Swimming,” Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2020, “If the Painted Juice Were Not Real, We Wouldn’t Exist in This Form in This World,” The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 2017, “TWS-Emerging 2012 ‘the visible star and the invisible star from the earth which looked at the spectacle that can be recalled and the spectacle that cannot be recalled, are revolving each other, including the earth’,” TWS Hongo, Tokyo. Recent awards: “Art Orinpia 2015” Executive Committee Special Award, “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2011” Tokyo Wonder Wall Prize.

NAKAZAWA Daisuke

Nakazawa Daisuke collects and reassembles trivial stories from everyday life, involving people and places, societies and customs, employing means of theater, cultural anthropology and architecture. The resulting interactive works encourage viewers to discover alternative views of things.

The TOKAS Hongo building was erected in 1928 as part of Tokyo City’s reconstruction project after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It initially served as an employment agency, before being transformed into a public vocational guidance center in 1949. Having functioned as a training school for several decades, it finally reopened in 2001 as an art center.

Inspired by the fact that the TOKAS Hongo building once accommodated the Hongo Employment Agency of Tokyo City, at this exhibition the artist temporarily sets up a present-day incarnation of the “Hongo Employment Agency.” After watching interviews with people of various professions/positions on the meaning of work, participants can book interviews with “agents” at the Employment Agency, which inspire them to look back on their own work. Through this opportunity to move back and forth between the past and the present, they can reflect on the meaning of work, including how we are supposed to approach “work” as an activity that we humans dedicate a large portion of our life to.

Nakazawa Daisuke lives and works in Tokyo and Kyoto. Graduated with an MA in Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2015. Founded the theater company “Pepin Structural Designs” together with classmates after graduating from high school. In recent years, he is increasingly active also as an individual artist. Recent works: Returning to the Soil, mori no tenjishitsu, Kyoto, 2021, Passage Tells: Ameyoko, Uokusa, Tokyo, 2020, Passage Tells: Shibuya, Shibuya Train Station, Tokyo, 2017. He is involved in Japanese-Chinese-Korean coproduction “The Behaviour Project,” which is planned to be resumed in 2022 after being delayed due to COVID-19. 

YUASA Ebosi

For his own creative work, the featured artist slips into the role of Yuasa Ebosi (1924-1987), a fictitious painter who was born in the Taisho era. In addition to historical backgrounds of the time, names of real living persons, such as Fukuzawa Ichiro or Yamashita Kikuji, appear in his fabricated biography as an artist who continues to interweave in his works threads of history and artful fiction.

Presented at this exhibition are works that were – allegedly – made by the fictional Yuasa Ebosi in the 1960s-70s. In a style that suggests influences from surrealism, “reportage painting” and American culture, the artist illustrates a history that could have been a reality, as part of his attempt to grasp the present age from various points of view.

Yuasa Ebosi was born in Chiba in 1983. Lives and works in Chiba. Graduated with a BFA from Toyo Institute of Art Design in 2008. Recent exhibitions: “still life 静物,” Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo, 2021, “Spectral Intrusions,” AKIO NAGASAWA GALLERY AOYAMA, Tokyo, 2019, “Prapagon Horse,” EUKARYOTE, Tokyo, 2019, “Shell Art Award Artist Selection 2018,” The National Art Center, Tokyo, “The 20th Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art,” Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 2017, “TWS-Emerging 2014 ‘News paper collage project’,” TWS Shibuya, Tokyo. Recent award: The 10th Koji Kinutani Award, 2018.

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 4 “Approach to Alternative Images”

Updated 18-02-2025

Watanabe Go, Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2021 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 3rd Edition - "Stasis Field 2020 > 2021" Exhibition

ACT 2021 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 3rd Edition - Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, Watanabe Go

Stasis Field 2020 > 2021 

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

20 February – 21 March 2021

For this year’s edition of the ACT exhibition, the Tokyo Arts and Space invited once again Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, and Watanabe Go, who were supposed to participate in “ACT Vol. 2 ‘Stasis Field’” that was eventually canceled due to the spread of COVID-19. The works on display represent their respective creators’ response to the significant changes in terms of value standards that the recent events have caused in society.

Last year’s “ACT Vol. 2 ‘Stasis Field’” had to be called off only a week after it opened, and the spread of the novel coronavirus made it impossible to continue. As globalization continues to advance, this new and unknown virus became a troublesome apparatus that hinders us from moving around the world freely, and that has very much turned the earth itself into one large “stasis field.” Even now that nearly a year has passed, we are still unable to return to life as we know it, and time continues to stand still.

The three featured artists present works that challenge our perception of things, by incorporating elements of deformation and/or distortion resulting from subtle temporal or spatial manipulations. Considering also the year-long postponement of their exhibition, here they examine from their own individual points of view the current state of society, with human activities being called to a halt by a new and unknown virus.

TANAKA Shusuke

In his works, Tanaka projects his feelings of amazement or discomfort by adjusting colors or intentionally emphasizing certain parts of sceneries he encounters in daily life.

In light of the fundamental changes that all kinds of limitations and restrictions have caused in social life, Tanaka Shusuke explains that he is now looking at things in different ways than he used to. The works featured here, including some that were derived from his exhibit at “ACT Vol. 2,” highlight these transformations in Tanaka’s perception as one effect of the current pandemic.

Born in Wakayama in 1986. Lives and works in Osaka. Recent exhibitions: “MOMAW Summer Museum Project #10: A Lot of Other Days Loaded in Today,” The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, 2020, “I try to forget, but I can't remember,” Borderless Art Museum NO-MA, Shiga, 2019, “TWS-Emerging 2016 ‘Section of the circle’,” TWS Shibuya, Tokyo.

HIROSE Nana & NAGATANI Kazuma

Dismantling the functions of daily commodities and other objects we use on a daily basis, Hirose and Nagatani create works that question existing values and established views of familiar things.

For "Still life", the installation they present in this exhibition, the artists made molds of various fruits, vegetables, light bulbs, cups and other daily commodities one by one, and used a special kind of porcelain compound that causes deformations of the sculpted objects during the firing process. By arranging countless objects in accordance with the venue’s spatial properties, Hirose and Nagatani transform the entire space of their exhibition, to explore how we normally perceive the world.

Profile

Born in Osaka in 1980 (Hirose), born in Hyogo in 1982 (Nagatani). Live and work in Dusseldorf. Recent exhibitions: “Out of the Ordinary,” Ulm Art Foundation, Germany, 2019, “Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial”, Niigata, 2018. Participated in “Research Residency Program 2017” (TWS).

WATANABE Go

Watanabe Go uses 3-D computer graphics for modeling books, dishes and other objects from his immediate environment, based on which he creates video works in which these objects transform in ways that defy material or optical laws.

For this exhibition, he focused on the route from his home to his atelier, as a time and space different from the “normal” that he became aware of as a result of the various restrictions imposed on him by the novel coronavirus. Here, the 35 minutes that the trip normally takes can be seen as a special kind of element that conjoins the “normal” environments of the artist’s private life and creative work, which are usually not connected. On display here is a double screen animation piece based on a number of previously made items that are installed in one corner of the artist’s atelier.

Born in Hyogo in 1975. Lives and works in Tokyo. Recent exhibitions: “Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2021: E-MOTION GRAPHICS,” “Azamino Contemporary vol. 8: Go Watanabe / dislocation,” Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino, 2017, “light difference -face III-,” URANO, Tokyo, 2017.

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 3  "Stasis Field 2020 > 2021"

Updated 18-02-2025

Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, Watanabe Go @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2020 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 2nd Edition - "Stasis Field" Exhibition

ACT 2020 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 2nd Edition - Tanaka Shusuke, Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma, Watanabe Go

Stasis Field 

停滞フィールド

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

22 February - 22 March 2020

Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has supported artists in a multi-career-stage and continuously supportive program through endeavors such as open call exhibitions, exhibitions of contemporary artists, and international fellowships. In the Artists Contemporary TOKAS (ACT) series launched in 2018, exhibitions will be held to introduce artists who are worthy of attention now, centered on those that have taken part in TOKAS programs. Introduced at this second installment, titled ”Stasis Field,” are works by three artists/pairs: TANAKA Shusuke, HIROSE Nana & NAGATANI Kazuma, WATANABE Go.

“Stasis field” is a term that has been used in science fiction novels and games, to refer to an area in which time seemingly stands still or is significantly delayed, and contents appear motionless. Due to the standstill and crystallization of time in a stasis field, objects in that area are in a state where they can be closely observed, or slowed down to such an extent that their shapes appear distorted.

In their works, the three artists featured in this exhibition stop or delay time in order to make it observable from their own respective points of view, and produce works of art in which they actively respond to and creatively express the differences, shifts and distortions that result from such temporal stagnation. In times when social life is increasingly dominated by the acceleration and quick processing of all kinds of matters. Experiences we make in such special kinds of situations “Stasis fields” may function as turning points that changes existing ideas and previous perceptions.

TANAKA Shusuke

Tanaka Shusuke participated in “TWS-Emerging 2016” at the Tokyo Arts and Space and awarded “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2016”. From the various sceneries he encounters in daily life, Tanaka stores all those things that bring him fresh new sensations, and experiences that make him feel scared or uncomfortable, inside his body. These things he uses as a source of inspiration for every new painting he creates. The sceneries he illustrates through the filter of what he thought or felt in those situations contain single elements that are depicted extremely large or otherwise emphasized, which results in a distorted spatial perception and a strange sense of reality. At this exhibition, Tanaka unveils several new works that show some of his recently encountered sceneries.

Tanaka Shusuke was born in Wakayama in 1986. Lives and works in Osaka. Graduated from Osaka University of Arts, Art department of oil painting course in 2009. Recent exhibitions: “I try to forget, but I can't remember”(Borderless Art Museum NO-MA, Shiga, 2019), "Kiyosu City Haruhi Painting Triennale Artist Series Vol. 87 Tanaka Shusuke" ("Kiyosu City Haruhi Art Museum, Aichi, 2018), "Recreating The Archives", (Mizunoki Museum of Art, Kyoto, 2018), "futeneniseiten, heijhonosakuretsu" (Gallery PARC, Kyoto, 2017), "Uncatchable Story" (Zuiun-an, Kyoto, 2017), “TWS-Emerging 2016: Section of the circle” (TWS Shibuya, Tokyo), “TOKYO WONDER WALL 2016” (TWS Shibuya, Tokyo), “FACE 2015: Sompo Japan Art Award Exhibition” (Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art). Awards: Kiyosu City Haruhi Painting Triennale Second Prize (2018), The 24th HOLBEIN Scholarship (2011).

HIROSE Nana & NAGATANI Kazuma

Hirose Nana & Nagatani Kazuma participated in “TWS Research Residency Program 2017” at the Tokyo Arts Space. The artist duo moved to Germany in 2007, where they continue to produce artworks. Through the various transformations and catabolic processes they introduce to daily commodities and objects we usually encounter on a daily basis, the artists explore in their works what exactly the viewers are perceiving in each case. 

Shown in this exhibition is the installation Still life, consisting of fruits, vegetables, cups and other objects – about 300 in total – molded from a special kind of porcelain compound. What looks like intentional deformations caused by some kind of external force, are in fact distortions that occurred as a chemical reaction to the heat when firing the porcelain. These numerous white objects eventually trigger a transformation of the entire space they are placed in, and encourage the viewer to recognize familiar things from different perspectives.

Born in Osaka in 1980 (Hirose), 1982 (Nagatani). Since 2007 live and work in Germany. Graduated with a BFA from Kyoto Seika University in 2005 and an MFA from University of the Arts Bremen in 2014., (Hirose). Graduated with a BFA from Kyoto Seika University in 2004 (Nagatani). Recent exhibitions: "Out of the Ordinary" (Ulm Art Foundation, Germany, 2019), “Why don’t cats wear shoes?” (Künstlerhaus Göttingen, Germany, 2019), “Why don’t cats wear shoes?” (Cuxhavener Kunstverein, Germany, 2019), “Another Place” with Anna Bart (Japan Foundation Cologne, Germany, 2018), "Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale" (Niigata, 2018), “Still Life”(Johann-Friedrich-Danneil-Museum, Salzwedel, 2017), "Of The Universe" (Weserburg Museum, Bremen, Germany, 2014), etc. Awards and grants: Audience Award at Bergisch Art Award (Solingen Museum, Germany, 2017), Overseas research Grant of Pola Art Foundation (Germany, 2015), Audience Award at the Erster Voelkling Art Award (HBKsaar, 2013), 1st Prize of University Award, (University of Fine Arts Bremen, 2012). Since 2018, they have participated in a two-year residence program in Ulm, Germany, with grants from the LBBW Foundation, Pola Art Promotion Foundation, Nomura Foundation and others.

WATANABE Go

For his video works, the artist recreates by way of 3-D computer graphics real sceneries and objects around him, and makes them gradually transform in ways disconnected from physical and optical laws. Based on the experience of spending a year in Finland in 2017, this time he produced a work in which he emphasizes the perception of light that he found to be different than in his native Japan. 

Unveiled in this exhibition is a new video installation that questions material, spatial and temporal characteristics, by reorganizing the temporal order and angles of light falling onto books and a pile of laundry.

Watanabe Go was born in Hyogo in 1975. Lives and works in Tokyo. Graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Aichi University of the Arts. Recent exhibitions: “Azamino Contemporary vol. 8 "Go Watanabe / dislocation" (Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino, 2017), “light difference -face III-” (URANO, Tokyo, 2017), 50th Anniversary Exhibition “Arts Begin From Forest” (Aichi University of Arts, 2016), “places” (ARATANIURANO, Tokyo, 2015), “Logical Emotion” (Haus Konstructive, Zurich, Switzerland / Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland / Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, Land Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, 2014-2015), “The APB Foundation Signature Art Prize” (The Singapore Art Museum, 2014), “Aichi Triennale 2013” (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 2013), “Asia Code: ZERO” (SOMA, Seoul, 2013), etc. Award: Newcomer's Prize of Art at the 24th Gotoh Memorial Cultural Award (2013).

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT（Artists Contemporary TOKAS）Vol. 2  "Stasis Field"

Updated 18-02-2025

Sato Masaharu, Nishimura Yu, Yoshigai Nao @ Tokyo Arts and Space - ACT 2019 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 1st Edition - "First Lingering Mist of Spring" Exhibition

ACT 2019 - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - 1st Edition - Sato Masaharu, Nishimura Yu, Yoshigai Nao

First Lingering Mist of Spring 

霞 はじめて たなびく 

Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo

23 February - 24 March 2019

Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has supported artists in a multi-career-stage and continuously supportive program through endeavors such as open call exhibitions, exhibitions of contemporary artists, and international fellowships. It has also conducted programs to introduce these artists’ activities. In the Artists Contemporary TOKAS (ACT) series launched this year, exhibitions will be held to introduce artists who are worthy of attention now, centered on those that have taken part in TOKAS programs.

This first exhibition showcases three artists: Sato Masaharu, Nishimura Yu, and Yoshigai Nao. They use images and paintings to evoke scenery that has never been visible before—they reinterpret the world through physical, intuitive scenes of the changing seasons and landscapes.

One way of expressing the seasons is the concept of “72 Micro-seasons” from ancient China. Each season name refers to changes shown by the weather, plants, and animals. This concept was adopted in Japan during the Edo Period, when it was partially revised by calendar scholars to match Japan’s landscape and climate. This exhibition starts in late February, which is called “Kasumi Hajimete Tanabiku,” or “Mist Begins to Linger.” During this time, the cold, dry air steadily becomes moister, and the distant scenery appears hazy. The humid air combines with floating dust and other substances, which transform the light. The three artists in this exhibition sensitively perceive these slight, ordinary changes with their bodies and create layers to depict brand-new scenery in the exhibition space.

SATO Masaharu

Sato Masaharu films actual scenery and creates animations by tracing the individual frames on a computer. He released Tokyo Trace (2015-2016), which depicts the changing scenery of Tokyo, followed by fukushima trace (2018), his new video installation for this exhibition showing daily life in Fukushima. This piece, created during his fight with cancer, expresses the scenery of Fukushima (where he has traveled after the earthquake) while superimposing it on his own body being ravaged by cancer. Part of it is animated, blurring the lines between the ordinary and extraordinary and beckoning the viewer into the video.

Sato Masaharu was born in Oita in 1973. Graduated with an MFA in Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999. Studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany in 2000-2002. Recent Exhibitions: "THE Doraemon ten" (Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo / Takaoka Art Museum, Toyama / Matsuzakaya Museum, Aichi, 2017-2018), "Gifu Land of Clear Waters Art Festival, Art Award IN THE CUBE 2017" (The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, 2017), "Hara Documents 10 Masaharu Sato: Tokyo Trace" (Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2016), "Everyday Life / Off the Record" (KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theater, Kanagawa, 2014), "The Earthly Paradise" (Gallery αM, Tokyo, 2013). Awards: Special award, "The12th Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art", Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki, Tokyo, (2009), Jury selection work of art division "15th JAPAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL", (2011). Upcoming Exhibitions: "Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexions" (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo) from 9 February, 2019, "Dr. Reaper" (KEN NAKAHASHI, Tokyo) from 15 February, 2019.

NISHIMURA Yu

Rather than reproducing actual scenery, Nishimura Yu depicts the present moment while layering in the things he takes notice of in daily life. His paintings resemble landscapes or people you have seen somewhere before, or scenes from a tale. In this exhibition, they are displayed in the space in a way that naturally suggests a story linking the works next to each other. He will exhibit new paintings inspired by early spring at this exhibition, with the aim of inspiring viewers to spin new stories.

Nishimura Yu was born in Kanagawa in 1982. Graduated with a BFA in Painting from Tama Art University in 2004. Recent Exhibitions: "Azamino Contemporary vol.9" (Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino, Kanagawa, 2018), "CONDO Shanghai" (GALLERY VACANCY, China, 2018), "portrait" (KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, 2017), "project N 61 Nishimura Yu" (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2015), "TWS-Emerging 2013 The Scenery Carried" (Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, 2013), etc. Awards: Grand Prize, Koji Kinutani Award (2017), Excellent Work Award, FACE 2014: Sompo Japan Art Award Exhibition (2014) etc. Current Exhibition: "Aperto 09 Nishimura yu" (Kanazawa 21st Century Museum, Ishikawa) until 24 March, 2019. Upcoming Exhibition: "VOCA 2019" (The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo) from 14 March 2019.

YOSHIGAI Nao

Yoshigai Nao uses video and sound to depict physical sensations, striving to create a new form of video expression. Her film Breathing House (2017) was shot at the Seizasha in Kyoto, where the Okada Seiza method of mental and physical cultivation popular in the Taisho Period was promoted, right before the building was destroyed. She carefully depicted the sounds that come from physical movements, linked with the determined breathing method and posture in which the subject sits quietly while holding the stomach strong. In this way, she filmed a scene that one doesn’t usually notice. For this exhibition, she will showcase a video installation that seems to integrate with the viewer’s body.

Yoshigai Nao was born in Yamaguchi in 1987. Graduated with a BA in Dance Studies from Japan Women's College of Physical Education and with MFA from Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts. Recent Exhibitions: "To travel with glasses" (Iwami Art Museum / Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art / Aomori Museum of Art, 2018-2019), "Primal Water" (Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas, USA, 2018), "hottamaru days--O JUN and Yoshigai Nao" (Minatomachi Art Table Nagoya, Aichi, 2016), "Breathing Room" (AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo, 2017), etc. Awards: New Face Award, Entertainment Division at the Japan Media Arts Festival (2015), YCAM Film Competition for Imaginary Film Music, (Sakamoto Ryuichi recommended, 2013), Jyaran Award, Sightseeing Division at Nasu Short Film Festival (2013). Current Exhibition: Grand Bouquet, "Open Space 2018: in transition", (NTT intercommunication Center [ICC], Tokyo, 2018,) until 10 March 2019.

TOKYO ARTS AND SPACE HONGO - TOKAS

2 -4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

www.tokyoartsandspace.jp

ACT - Artists Contemporary TOKAS - Vol. 1  "First Lingering Mist of Spring"

Updated 18-02-2025

Brassaï @ Higher Pictures, NYC - Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968

Brassaï, Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968

Higher Pictures, NYC

Through March 5, 2016

Higher Pictures presents Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968 presenting together for the first time Graffiti I and Nocturne, two of the earliest of seven known tapestries created by BRASSAI. The tapestries, both made in 1968 by the renowned Atelier Yvette Cauquil-Prince, were woven from Brassaï’s collages of his own Graffiti photographs and are exhibited here alongside a selection of gelatin silver prints from the well-known series.

Brassaï began taking photographs of graffiti he saw on walls throughout Paris in the early 1930s and first published a suite of them in a 1933 issue of the surrealist magazine Minotaure (no. 3 – 4), writing there that graffiti had “toppled all the painstakingly devised canons of our aesthetic.” Brassaï wrote about the spontaneous, untrained scrawls and carvings of the graffitists as eternal and formative gestures, imagining children discovering and recreating the human face by gouging two eyeholes into stone or sharing naïve expressions of love through carved hearts and roughly inscribed initials. Though this language would later inspire Jean Dubuffet to make a direct connection between Brassaï’s project and Art Brut, a term Dubuffet coined in the late 1940s to describe what we now call outsider art, Brassaï never aligned himself with the movement.

In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the exhibition Language of the Wall: Parisian Graffiti Photographed by Brassaï, featuring over 100 prints from the series selected by Edward Steichen and organized by the artist into visual categories, including: faces; love; war; birds and beasts; wizards and phantoms; and the sign of death. In the exhibition’s press release, Steichen establishes graffiti as “chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the everyday life of the ‘man in the street’ of the period, and for the intimate details of customs and institutions of people in a particular time and place.” It was following MoMA’s exhibition and the subsequent publication of Graffiti de Brassaï in 1961 that Brassaï and Yvette Cauquil-Prince—a master weaver who had already worked with Pablo Picasso and would collaborate with Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexander Calder—first discussed translating his photographs into textiles. The process of making Graffiti I and Nocturne would have begun with Brassaï making a collage of prints (each tapestry here comprises more than twenty photographs) that was then used to create a full-scale template, called a cartoon. Placed under or behind the loom, the cartoon provided the weaver with a blueprint for the final piece.

Graffiti I (1968) was Brassaï and Cauquil-Prince’s first tapestry. Measuring nearly 5 feet tall and 10 feet wide, it features what Brassaï called the “bird-woman” (the gelatin silver print is also on view here) in the center of the composition and twinned in miniature in the upper left corner. She is surrounded primarily by images of lovers’ hearts, though a skull and other glyphs appear, all rendered in the grays, browns, and blacks of Paris’ walls. Nocturne, 4 1⁄2 feet tall and 9 feet wide, was completed the same year. The eponymous evening light is captured in vibrant blues and violets; once again, though now facing in the opposite direction, the bird-woman anchors the composition in the center and reappears in the upper left corner. A number of the same hearts from Graffiti I appear around her, joined by a curvilinear female silhouette and a crossbones motif topped with a broadly smiling face in the place of a skull. The Graffiti project charts Brassaï’s transposition of drawing into photograph, and then both into tapestry, ultimately, in the artist’s own words, returning to the wall what he took from it.

Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Brassó, Transylvania in 1899. In 1924, after studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenburg in Berlin, he moved to Paris where he began working as a journalist and, eventually, a photographer. He took the pseudonym of his hometown in 1932 and the next year published his first photobook, the landmark Paris de Nuit. Widely considered one of the most important artists of the interwar period, Brassaï worked actively through the late 1960s; he died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France in 1984. His work has since been the subject of several major retrospectives, including Brassaï at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Hayward Gallery, London in 2000 and Brassaï: The Eye of Paris at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 1998.

HIGHER PICTURES

980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY

http://higherpictures.com

Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland - Inaugural exhibition of the new visual art gallery

Inaugural exhibition: Borrowed Memories 
Luan Gallery, Athlone, Co Westmeath, Ireland
Through 24 February 2013

Borrowed Memories: Exhibition from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art is the inaugural exhibition of the new Luan Gallery, Athlone, County Westmeath, in Ireland, officially opened on Thursday 29 November 2012. 

The name ‘Luan’ derives from the Irish for Athlone, 'Baile Áth Luain' and was proposed as part of a public competition organised to name the new gallery. Designed by Keith Williams Architects, the Luan Gallery is first new visual art gallery to be opened in Ireland in over three years. In its previous incarnations the building which now houses the Luan Gallery has been many things to many people and to the town of Athlone – a library, concert hall, cinema and town hall to name but a few. Commenting on the exhibition Miriam Mulrennan, Manager, the Luan Gallery said: “Rich and colourful memories are associated with the building. Respect for people’s connection to the building formed a centre point in curating Borrowed Memories.” 

ANN HAMILTON

Ann Hamilton, Filament II, 1996

Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2002

Courtesy of the IMMA, Dublin

The location of the Luan Gallery, in the centre of Ireland, on the banks of the River Shannon is reflected in the work of American artist Ann Hamilton. Filament II, 1996 comprises a silk organza curtain, which has been distressed by the artist, hanging from a circular rail. It is a sculpture with blurred boundaries and changeable volume and form, at once a public and private space. The curtain envelopes you but is transparent, so a shadowy figure is still visible to others standing outside. The presence or absence of people changes perceptions and experience of the work and in this regard it is interactive and participatory.  

Where Do Broken Hearts Go, 2000, by Longford-born Bristol-based artist Daphne Wright became the lynch pin for the idea of memories and the combination of shadow and light that are our own memories and those of others. Layering plays an important part in Wright’s work and here we see, not only the physical layering of the foil strips to create the giant foil cacti, but also the layering of the different elements which come together to make the entire installation – the folded strips of household tinfoil, the Country and Western lyrics and the intaglio prints made from found photographs by an anonymous photographer. 

PATRICK GRAHAM

Patrick Graham, Ark of Dreaming, 1990

Mixed media on canvas, 180 x 316 cm

Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 1991

Courtesy of the IMMA, Dublin

Westmeath-native Patrick Graham’s Ark of Dreaming, 1990, explores both colour and gesture. Words combined with vestiges of figurative imagery, and layers of heavily worked and reworked paint are applied to the canvas which has been ruthlessly split open and crudely stitched together in a diptych suggestive of an alterpiece. 

The work of Irish artist Shane Cullen created from the smuggled messages of the 1981 Maze hunger strikers presents itself to the audience as a forceful narrative of a dark time in our history which demands reflection. Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, 1993 - 1997 was made over a period of four years and consists of 96 large styrofoam panels, each carrying transcriptions of the secret messages smuggled out of the H-Blocks in the Maze Prison. The subject matter is controversial but presented in a highly disciplined manner that references historical monuments. Each painted word mimics official government documents. 

Works such as Blue Crucifixion, 2003, by Manchester-born, Irish-based artist Hughie O’Donoghue and Dublin-based photographer Amelia Stein’s Memory and Loss, 2002, series of photographs are also shown. Other works shown in the exhibition include Dublin-based artist Amanda Coogan’s photograph Medea, 2001, and Northern Irish photographer Hannah Starkey’s Untitled, August, 1999.

Luan Gallery, Athlone, County Westmeath
Luan Gallery's Website: www.athloneartandheritage.ie

Irish Museum of Modern Art's Website: www.imma.ie

The Art Institute of Chicago has opened its expanded new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas

The Art Institute of Chicago recently (June 3, 2011) opened its expanded galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas. Following an extensive four-year planning, construction, and reinstallation project, the combined 7,500 square foot gallery spaces—located in the Art Institute’s lower Morton Wing (G136 and G137)—have now been freshly conceived and completely renovated to accommodate more than 550 objects on display. For the first time in the museum’s history, the majority of the Art Institute’s superb collection of African art and Indian art of the Americas can finally be seen in cohesive presentations that are impressive and enlightening.

Art Institute of Chicago's new African Art gallery 

Art Institute of Chicago: Digital gallery rendering, African art gallery. Copyright © 2011 wHY Architecture

“ The new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas will be a revelation to visitors,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute. “Our collections are extraordinary; only a small fraction have ever been seen. They will now be shown in their true glory. A great deal of time, effort, research, and creativity went into conceptualizing these state-of-the-art installations. Viewers will find them unlike any of our other galleries, and they will be at the forefront of professional practices for years to come. We are really looking forward to seeing our visitors experience these galleries and these collections. We believe their patience will be well rewarded. ”

Seeking a unique approach to displaying African art and Indian art of the Americas, the Art Institute commissioned wHY Architecture and Planning—the California-based architectural firm responsible for the museum’s renovated galleries for prints and drawings, European decorative arts, and Japanese art—to create a unified set of galleries that present an exciting range of forms and materials. The new galleries, with expanded installation space, allow visitors to view never-beforeseen works of art, as well as familiar favorites, in a new light. Upon entering, visitors will notice vibrant wall graphics, harmonious lighting, and specially designed display cases lining the walls. Some of these cases extend into the center of the room, or stand freely in the space, creating “gateways” filled with art works. Viewers will thus feel they are stepping into the displays, forming an interactive relationship with the art.

Art Institute of Chicago: Digital gallery rendering, Indian art of the Americas gallery

Digital gallery rendering, Indian art of the Americas gallery. Copyright © 2011 wHY Architecture

The galleries also feature new interpretive materials, including maps and a comparative timeline. Additionally, for the first time in a permanent installation at the Art Institute, both galleries also feature original video presentations that are designed to complement the works of art on display. The videos play for approximately two to three minutes and then disappear completely for four or five minutes—leaving no shadow on the wall—before the next sequence begins. Richard Townsend, Chairman of the Department of African Art and Indian Art of the Americas and curator of Indian art of the Americas, has conceptualized a video display that combines a concise and poetic narrative with visually striking images of works of art, archaeological sites, landscapes, and seasonal phenomena to convey significant, overarching themes. Kathleen Bickford Berzock, curator of African art, commissioned three original video presentations by Susan Vogel, edited by Harry Kafka. Working closely together, Berzock and Vogel selected three themes that broadly represent important areas, art forms, and concepts related to the collection. The presentations use a three-channel triptych format that suggests contrasts and connections, and shows multiple aspects of a given work. It also permits a playful, almost musical use of imagery, bringing the texture of daily life into the gallery. Each sequence interweaves images of works of art in the museum’s collection and the museum context itself into its theme. Footage for the videos was shot by Susan Vogel, Prince Street Pictures, and by the late Robert Rubin. 

The new installations highlight a significantly broader selection of artworks than previously seen and showcase examples of the culturally and visually varied fields of African art and Indian art of the Americas. The Art Institute’s African art collection includes sculpture, masks, household and personal adornment objects, and regalia from across the continent. While the core of the collection features sculpture from West and Central Africa, acquisitions over the past 20 years bring attention to important artistic traditions from eastern, northern, and southern Africa. In the greatly expanded African art gallery, sculptural works of art are presented in the round, with African textiles displayed on a rotating basis in two locations. The museum’s holdings of Indian art of the Americas span more than 4,000 years and include outstanding works from across the United States as well as ancient Mesoamerica and the Andean countries of South America. Ceramics, basketry, textiles, stone sculpture, metalwork, painting, and beadwork present a remarkable picture of the indigenous artistic heritage and deep-seated patterns of thought and ritual performance throughout the region. Both collections have been reinterpreted for the new galleries in compelling ways.

As part of the inaugural installation of the new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas, a fantastic selection of special loans will be on view throughout the year. One of the treasures on loan is a richly worked textile woven from the golden threads of the Golden Orb spider (Nephila Madagascariensis) of Madagascar. Made with the silk of over 1,000,000 spiders, this dazzling brocaded cloth is the only one of its kind in the world. Harvesting spider silk with a team of 80 people for almost five years, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley created this unique spider silk textile, weaving it in the elaborate textured patterns of a lamba akotyfahana, a 19th-century luxury textile of Madagascar’s Merina nobility. Completed in 2008, this stunning spider silk textile will be on view at the museum through October 2011.

Golden spider silk textile from Madagascar (detail). Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Another masterpiece on loan to the Art Institute is a one-of-a-kind, eagle-feather headdress from the Northern Plains. Identified as regalia of a headman of the Northern Cheyenne (Tsistsisas) people, this headdress has been attributed by scholars and traditional experts to the Crazy Dog Society (Hotam’-imassa’u), one of the six warrior bands of the Northern Cheyenne. This particular object—made of buffalo hides and arrayed with the tail feathers of the bald eagle, great horned owl, black-billed magpie, and immature golden eagle—is unusual in featuring pronghorn antelope horns on either side of the cap, unlike the much more typical use of split buffalo horns. The Crazy Dog headdress was acquired and preserved by descendants of family members of a cattle drover who was killed evidently by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors in eastern Wyoming Territory in 1872. The Northern Cheyenne headdress has been loaned to the Art Institute in honor of the unknown native artists. The unveiling of the new galleries of African art and Indian art of the Americas represents a milestone in the most ambitious renovation and reinstallation project in the Art Institute’s history.

Art Institute of Chicago
Museum's website: www.artic.edu

Irvine Contemporary, Gallery artists exhibition of new works titled Saturnalia is a festival of new art to celebrate the New Year

Exhibition: Saturnalia
New Work by Gallery Artists
Irvine Contemporary, Washington DC
January 8 - February 12, 2011

The exhibition includes works by Teo González, Melissa Ichiuji, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Akemi Maegawa, Alexa Meade, Susana Raab, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick.

ALEXA MEADE

Alexa Meade, Double Take, 2010. 

C-print, artist's installation. 20 x 16 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

ALEXA MEADE's new photographs extend her strategy of defining a new intersecting point for multiple genres and techniques, merging photography, performance, painting, installation, and portraiture. Her images are at once records of a performance, a portrait session in a constructed set or installation, and a reflection on three- and two-dimensional representational spaces. Meade calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium. Her final photographic images read like portraits, but with the codes for fiction, illusion, truth, the index of the real, the imaginary, and pictorial representation confounded, conflated, and exposed. Alexa Meade lives and works in Washington, DC. 

SUSANA RAAB

Susana Raab, Cholita 1, 2010. 

C-print. 24 x 22 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

SUSANA RAAB presents recent work from her evolving photography series, Cholita, which were shot in Peru. Raab was born in Peru, and though she moved to the US at three, Peru has always fascinated her as a land of mixed identities and cultural adaptations. "Cholo" originally referred to people from black and native parents, and is used today in masculine and feminine forms for those of mixed race and/or lower social class. Cholo/chola are also part of US urban slang for Latino/Latina gang styles, usually with deprecation. Raab has re-appropriated the term for her own personal reflection on Peruvian and Latin American identities in a series of highly original and direct portraits that only a photographer with her background, access, and identification with her subjects could produce. Susana Raab lives and works in Washington, DC. 

TEO GONZALES

Teo González, Cloudy Sky, New York, 2010

Acrylic on panel. 12 x 12 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

TEO GONZALES's new paintings challenge the boundaries of organic and geometric form through a process of abstraction from the colors of skies over specific city locations. González's new series of works are based on photographs of skies, which he uses to map a color palette in Photoshop. He then selects a restricted set of colors, matches them to pigments, and composes a painting of cells and drops of paint that snake and weave across the surface. These new paintings display González's signature method of elegant challenges to the formal categories and genres of painting, this time drawing in a reference to the world outside painting and fusing computer pixels and organic form. González has looped around the issues in abstraction, and now discovered a way to make paintings like organic stained-glass windows back-lit by a city sky. Teo González lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

MELISSA ICHIUJI

Melissa Ichiuji, Nature's Promise, 2010. 

Fabric, wood, nylon, found objects, mixed media. 

Dimensions variable. Detail. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

MELISSA ICHIUJI's new work expands on her approach to materials, identities, domestic space, and sexualities. Her sculptures and installations are performative works and staged fantasies about innocence and perversion, power and seduction, sexuality and the domestic space, and often explore the boundaries of childhood innocence and adult self-consciousness and repression. Each sculpture is sewn and assembled from many materials, including nylon, fabric, leather, bones, fur, hair, and found objects. Advancing the Surrealist tradition in the works of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois, Ichiuji's works are at once playful, humorous, and subversive. With humor and playful irony, they provide perfect three-dimensional emblems for today's anxieties about the family, childhood, sex, and the body. Melissa Ichiuji lives and works in Front Royal, VA. 

HEDIEH JAVANSHIR IICHI

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Untitled, 2010. 

Acrylic and mixed media on Mylar, 78 x 60 in. (detail) 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

HEDIEH JAVANSHIR IICHI presents new mixed media paintings on Mylar as provocative visual essays on Persian, Iranian, and American cultural identities. Fusing sources and references from historical Persian miniature painting, contemporary Iranian social and political imagery, and the visual codes of Western abstraction, Ilchi composes imaginary scenes where cultural and sexual identities are given space to reveal questions and contradictions without canceling or denying the significance of multiple histories and cultural positions. Ilchi uses militarist icons of the current Iranian regime as invasions and disruptions of a possible cultural coexistence. Her female figures with long-flowing, loosened hair are posed in jeans and contemporary fashion, a challenge to the current regime's restraints to be sure, but her figures seem equally at home in a Persian landscape, a modern abstract color field, or a contemporary urban scene. Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi lives and works in Washington, DC. 

NICHOLAS KAHN & RICHARD SELESNICK

Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, 

archival pigment print, 10 X 72 in. (detail). 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

NICHOLAS KAHN & RICHARD SELESNICK present works from their new series, Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, an historical fictional narrative of the colonization of Mars. This body of work also represents the first time that artists have used NASA’s high-resolution imagery from Mars. Continually working like art directors for film sets, Kahn and Selesnick have created complex photo-montage compositions combining NASA shots of the Martial surface with their own sets and location photography. Through the mystery of a discovered colony on Mars, this new project explores questions of ecological and societal collapse, myths about technology and colonization, and the ideologies of utopia and dystopia. Kahn & Selesnick live and work in New York and Massachusetts, and on location in cyberspace. 

AKEMI MAEGAWA

Akemi Maegawa, White Jizō, 2010. 

Unique glazed porcelain sculptures, 18  x 9  x 9 in.  

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

AKEMI MAEGAWA expands her work in ceramics and Japanese pop culture with new Jizō figures in white glazed porcelain. Jizō Bodhisattva is a traditional Buddhist guardian divinity for travelers going between spiritual states and for the souls of children. Jizō figures have appeared in many forms and in both sexes over the centuries, and are now commonly seen along roadsides and graveyards in Japan. The figure has entered Japanese pop culture in a variety of styles, including cartoon and hyper-cute versions, similar to the use of Daruma images and figures. Maegawa has adopted Jizō for her playful work at the intersections of Japanese and American pop, kitsch, and fashion. Her Jizō figures welcome visitors as travelers into the gallery space. Akemi Maegawa lives and works in Washington, DC. 

IRVINE CONTENPORARY

1412 14th Street, NW

WASHINGTON, DC 20005

www.irvinecontemporary.com