EXHIBITION
Exhibition
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Alex Da Corte Fresh Hell
2023.4.29(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
Today, life’s every nook and cranny is saturated with visually appealing images. Creators and inventors are constantly thinking about what kinds of images operate on the human psyche and how to visualize the things that normally go unseen: emotions, time, and space. Alex Da Corte is an artist known for works that play with objects and icons that feel familiar to him, deconstructing and reconstructing their original meanings. He draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history and design, sampling the visual culture of America through a variety of media including video, sculpture, painting, and installation. In all of his methods, Da Corte’s attention to vivid color and form is evident, and familiar motifs become dense, graceful assemblages thanks to his extensive knowledge of art history and his subtle and distinctive sensibility. While these works have an allure that draws people in, they also appeal to inexpressible human emotions such as loneliness and anxiety, making people dance in a strange, delusional world outside of the realm of rational organization. This is the first exhibition for Alex Da Corte at an art museum in Asia, and will feature a total of 11 video installations and other works, including recent and never-before-seen pieces. The varied images projected on an overwhelmingly large box-shaped screen frequently appear light, coquettish, and funny, but they also possess a consistently mysterious appeal that plays havoc with one’s mind the more deeply one engages with them. “Fresh Hell” also ventures into the relationship between desire, memory, and perception that has come to define consumer culture in a contemporary society faced with an onslaught of visual information, confronting us with the question of what this inundation of images brings about.
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Collection Exhibition 1 It knows : When Forms Become Mind
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.11.5(Sun.)
As a universal theme relating to our ability to perceive and interpret the world, the relationship between form and mind has been explored in art since ancient times. Gregory Bateson, the multidisciplinary scientist who continuously explored the ecology of mind and nature, described a “mind” as a large network that makes connections among interrelated forms and shapes and their respective patterns. Visible and invisible patterns of various kinds – natural, social, verbal, subconscious – arise everywhere in the world. In the course of daily life, we get a sense of mental systems greater than the individual mind, emerging naturally from relationships among forms and typologies. These patterns and structures are part of a larger network of exchanges and connections that underpin the earth and its ecosystem, and serve as the background for the way we interpret and interact with the world. Art, the history of which is still ongoing, engages with this grand theme by exploring how shapes and patterns shape our perception and understanding of the world, and how they connect to what we might call “mind.” By juxtaposing works from the museum’s diverse collection of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation from the 1960s to the present day with works by artists invited for this exhibition, this show takes viewers on a journey through the process of the mind that grasps relationships among diverse forms.
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Collection Special Exhibition + Communication Program
NARA Yoshitomo ―Dog-o-rama
2023.4.29(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
This exhibition presents Yoshitomo Nara’s Dog-o-rama, Lonely Moon/Voyage of the Moon, and a group of drawings on display for the first time since their acquisition. All of these works were created as part of Nara’s exhibition “Moonlight Serenade” (2006-2007), which was conceived on the premise of the museum’s “open” function. Dog-o-rama is a project-type work created by a dog, an important motif for Nara. It consists of Pup Patrol, a project that expands the world of the museum as children in dog costumes tour the museum, and Pup Up the Dog, which completes the giant 7-meter-long stuffed animal, Pup King, filled with old clothes and other fabrics brought in by people. Dog-o-rama will provide visitors with an opportunity to participate in the work and experience the world of Nara’s artworks within the entire space, including drawings and plate paintings, as well as to reconsider how one might appreciate artworks in museums through the activities of children dressed as dogs.
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Shell of Phantom Light
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
Using the raden (mother-of-pearl inlay) technique, the craft artist IKEDA Terumasa (1987-) depicts insubstantial objects such as data and electrical signals, as well as imaginary animals. Numbers fall down like rain, and patterns resembling electronic circuits exhibit movement depending on the angle. The iridescent light of the shells represents the electric current and data that underlie human life today. A conch features long water-tube grooves like a bone shell, while a dragonfly has five pairs of wings. The mother-of-pearl inlay decoration on the surface imparts the sublimity of the idol to these fictional forms. Ikeda’s act of creation is akin to a “Shin,” a mythical shell-like creature in folklore embodying a landscape that does not exist in this world by spitting out mirages. This exhibition presents a total of 14 works from the first 10 years of Ikeda’s creative practice, divided into two phases. The exhibition venue, which brings together his own collection and works, including biological and mineral specimens as well as toys and books, allows visitors a glimpse into Ikeda’s “Natural History,” as well as an intuitive experience of the genealogy of his outlandish forms. In order to express his exquisite worldview in the form of minute vessels, Ikeda introduced new technologies such as a cutting machine for the production of the base material, and a pulsed laser for the cutting out of the mother-of-pearl inlay chips, while continuing to use traditional lacquer techniques. Each step in the production process and the production of raden obi, the result of a collaboration with the textile industry, are introduced through videos.
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Aperto 18 GU Kenryou Intervals of the afterimage
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
GU Kenryou employs an original technique known as “digital weaving,” in which multiple photographs are woven together at a pixel level to create photographic works with a textural quality resembling fabric, expressing the latent context underlying the images. This exhibition will feature a new series of large-scale photographs taken with a high-resolution camera in forests around the world, including the primeval forests of Fujian Province in China. As a result of their size, the images as a whole are not compressed or reduced to the framework of “flatness,” but rather trigger active movement of the viewer’s eye, evoking the sense of awe experienced and the ghostly murmurs heard in the shadows of a forest. Meanwhile, the artist’s distinctive method of weaving multiple images together manually in repeating rows and columns of pixels, one by one, generates fluctuations on an unconscious level that transcend the artist’s intentions, confining the natural spatial and temporal scale of the earth within the works in a complex fashion. Gu’s art stimulates our common planetary memory, and by imprinting the multi-temporal, multi-lingual, and multi-locational nature of the forest on our minds like an afterimage, brings about changes in the sensibilities of the contemporary viewer paralyzed by an accelerating deluge of visual information.
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