EXHIBITION
Exhibition
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- Past
AWAZU Kiyoshi: What Can Design Do
2019.5.18(Sat.) - 2019.9.23(Mon.)
Since 2006, 2939 works and materials in the artist’s collection have been gifted to this museum and carefully researched. In 2007, the museum presented “Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu,” exhibiting 1,750 of the gifted works along workshops, performances, and valuable testimonies from creators having past involvement in Awazu’s activities. Based on its ongoing research of the Awazu collection, the museum from 2014 to ’18 hosted a five-part series, “Awazu Kiyoshi: Makurihirogeru,” exploring facets of Awazu’s world under specific themes such as performance, architecture and photography. Now in 2019—a decade after Awazu Kiyoshi’s passing—we are presenting an ambitious Awazu Kiyoshi retrospective, representing the culmination of this museum’s years of research. Inviting his son, AWAZU Ken, in the role of exhibition supervisor, we will clearly reveal the essence of Awazu’s design from the perspective of his undying interest in ordinary people and his primary motivation—“Designing society.” Such is an important perspective for us as well, as people entrusted with creating the society of tomorrow. Taking this opportunity, furthermore, the museum will formally open its entire Awazu Kiyoshi archives database to public access and begin making some works available as open data. Through non-hierarchical image reproduction, a condition Awazu viewed as a “popular icon” of creative freedom, we will carry on the artist’s spirit. ●Exhibition Composition ●List of works
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Oscar Oiwa Journey to the Light
2019.4.27(Sat.) - 2019.8.25(Sun.)
With brilliant, light-filled colors and dynamic spatial structures, Oscar OIWA creates vivid depictions of contemporary society that are infused with critical and humorous qualities. Born in São Paulo, Brazil to Japanese parents in 1965, Oiwa splits his time between Tokyo and New York, making works that share both the perspective of an ordinary urban dweller and an objective bird’s eye view. Addressing themes such as the cities and societies he inhabits and environmental problems, Oiwa freely integrates photographs, printed matter, and images from the Internet to realize a unique worldview that wavers between reality and fantasy, artifice and nature, and light and shadow. This exhibition explores Oiwa’s vision through a collection of approximately 60 works, with an emphasis on recent efforts, and a 27-meter-long drawing executed on a wall in the museum. In addition, the composer Chad CANNON was invited to take part in a collaborative project, in which Oiwa’s work served as the inspiration for a magnificent symphony that coalesces with the paintings. With any luck, the light that Oiwa pursues in his work while traveling all over the world will reawaken a sense of hope, helping us deal with the difficulty of living in the current era.
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Special Exhibition
NAWA Kohei "Foam"
2019.4.27(Sat.) - 2019.8.25(Sun.)
NAWA Kohei will display Foam, an installation employing foam and light. Foam—tiny bubbles appearing in succession and coalescing in a mass. Nawa expresses foam’s power to autonomously create an organic structure. The individual bubbles, which are born and die in a process resembling the cellular processes of metabolism and circulation, awaken in viewers associations with the source of life.
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Koichi Sato: Third Landscape
2019.4.6(Sat.) - 2019.9.23(Mon.)
At a time when artworks centered on the visual sense still predominate, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is proud to be staging a exhibition that explore the next possibilities for art museum activities by embracing new expression that stirs not only the sense of sight but also the non-visual senses of hearing and smell. Based on an interest in anthropology and botany, SATO Koichi (b. 1990) has examined the possibilities of entities that teeter ambiguously on various boundaries. He inquires into the boundary – invisible but certainly present – between “the self” and “that which is not the self,” complexly combining not only video and installations but also non-visual media such as sound and smell to present a future in which these entities co-exist while fluctuating between the two. The exhibition title, “Third Landscape,” derives from a concept put forward by leading French gardener / garden designer Gilles Clément, indicating space in which the evolution of the landscape is left entirely to nature. According to this concept, places such as vacant city lots, abandoned land in farming villages and borders between countries that have been neglected or suppressed by humans are assessed positively as privileged places receptive to biodiversity. One could say that this “third landscape,” in which various elements are able to exist complexly alongside each other, offers a range of suggestions as to the nature of the relationship between people and plants in our society going forward. Based on this symbolic term and including such works as the fig reproduction-themed Mutant Variations, this exhibition provides a bird’s eye view of Koichi Sato’s current practice. *The announced exhibition change was canceled due to the conveniences.
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Aperto 10
YOKOYAMA Nami Memories of Love and Me
2019.4.6(Sat.) - 2019.6.30(Sun.)
YOKOYAMA Nami (1986-) produces paintings depicting motifs of objects that are consumed or discarded in everyday life. By giving a leading role to items ordinarily ignored, whose fate it is to be thrown away, she distances herself from predefined meanings and uses, endeavoring to see in new ways and express “the primordial beauty and meaning of existence inherent in all things.” This exhibition will feature works addressing the themes she has recently turned her energies to—“What is love?” and “What is beauty?” Yokoyama’s neon series of paintings depict both the beautiful light of the neon tubes—their leading role—and their “unsightly” wiring, power cords, and mounting hidden at the back. In this way, she gives equal prominence to our ideals and aspirations and our hidden side we are unable to gloss over. Then, her charcoal drawing series Memories of Love and Me, whose name lends this exhibition its title, depicts scenes of her memories of a girl and a dog named Love. After hearing the news that advances in selective breeding to meet people’s preferences in fact shorten the dogs’ lives, she felt compelled to examine the “love” we give our dogs. “Love”—a word used too casually these days. By exercising her qualms and misgivings or else serious emotions about “love” in artworks, she pursues the meaning of this word tossed around in everyday life. Through some 30 paintings and drawings—the fruits of Yokoyama’s investigation into “love”—visitors will have occasion to ponder the essential nature of things.
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