Tokyo
micro salon 2014
2014/12/6–2015/12/27
Saya Irie
Born in 1983 in Okayama, Irie completed Hiroshima City University’s pre-doctoral art studies course in 2009, and is currently based in Hiroshima. Her work was honoured in the 2009 Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art, and she was the recipient of the sixth Shiseido “Art Egg” award in 2012. Irie’s technique is to rub out a two-dimensional image with an eraser, and then use the eraser residue to recreate the same image in three dimensions. In one work, an image of the goddess Guanyin has been erased from a scroll only to be re-embodied in three dimensions, hovering in space. In another, a portrait on a banknote has been recreated as a bust placed on the bank note. By taking icons that have attained “currency” through their ubiquity, erasing them, and then recreating them as three dimensional sculptures in the same realm as the viewer, Irie’s works ask humorously modern questions about the way we interact with these images.
Learn MoreShowichi Kaneda
Showichi Kaneda was born in Kyoto in 1970. Since completing his postgraduate studies in painting at the Kyoto City University of Arts in 1995, he has been based in Kyoto, where he continues to live and work. Kaneda has also been teaching in the department of painting at his alma mater since 2009. Kaneda’s paintings and sculptures, the surfaces of which demonstrate an impressive use of rich vibrant colors, both use fiber-reinforced plastic and resin as supports. They make use of a variety of different materials in skillful combinations, such as oil paint, varnish, acrylic lacquer, automotive paint, decal and surfacer. Human’s Own, a striking series of sculptures based on motifs found on F1 “shark fin” engine covers, was originally inspired by thinking about the animal-like properties of human beings. These works express something of the essential human desire for profit and the relentless pursuit of speed. In addition to being a symbol of speed, the form of the F1 machine in Human’s Own is a metaphor for the shark, an animal that dies once it stops moving – an apt representation of the reality of our daily lives.
Learn MoreHiroto Kitagawa
Hiroto Kitagawa was born in Shiga prefecture in 1967. After graduating from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1989, he travelled to Italy, inspired by figurative Italian sculptors such as Marino Marini. Kitagawa studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Carrara, where he was trained in traditional terracotta sculpting techniques. Since his return to Japan, Kitagawa has been a consistent exhibitor of sculptures both in Japan and overseas. Kitagawa’s works use acrylics to add life to the most primitive of media –clay – in order to depict people living in the present day, with some of these works featured at an exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa.
Learn MoreIsao Sugiyama
杉山功は1977年に東京造形大学彫刻科を卒業後、同大学研究室へ進学。1983年、卒業と同時にイタリアへと渡り、カラーラ美術アカデミーに入学します。卒業後はイタリアに留まり、ミラノ、カラーラを拠点に制作活動を行ってきました。これまで主にヨーロッパで個展を開催し、世界各地のグループ展やアートフェアで作品を発表しています。
杉山の彫刻は大理石と木から成ります。未加工の大理石を自然に見立て、そこに家のフォルムを配置することで、文明の存在をほのめかすのです。ゆっくりと風化していく石と、早々と朽ちて消える木の対比によって、自然の時間と文明の時間の異なるリズムが喚起されます。このような光景を俯瞰する作家あるいは我々の視点は、世界の全体を捉えようとする宗教的なビジョンとも言えるのです。
Miki Taira
Miki Taira was born in 1984. After majoring in calligraphy at Tokyo Gakugei University, she began making sculptures incorporating calligraphy that are based on old Japanese folktales. Since winning the silver prize at Geisai #10 in 2006, Taira has been exhibiting her works at group shows and art fairs both in Japan and abroad. Taira’s works are inspired by oral traditions and folklore that originate in Japan’s rural countryside. She stitches together sheets of hemp cloth dyed with barley tea to form the characters in these stories, and then transcribes the folktale in question onto the surface of her sculptures in dense Japanese writing. While the textures of the cloth and brushstrokes impart an antique look to her works, there is also something faintly ridiculous about their abstract form that imbues them with a special humor.
Learn MoreMitsukuni Takimoto
Mitsukuni Takimoto was born in Fukuoka in 1952. He moved to Italy in 1977 to apprentice to Tomonori Toyofuku, who was active in Milan at the time. Since then, Takimoto has consistently pursued a wood sculpture practice while remaining faithful to traditional techniques. Takimoto also works as an expert in the restoration of Buddhist sculptures. Under the influence of Toyofuku, Takimoto worked on abstract sculptural reliefs throughout the 1980s. In the ‘90s he shifted his style toward a more representational one. However, while these works can be called representational, he chooses only subjects like waterfalls and rivers, clouds and smoke: figures that remain in the viewer’s memory like an afterimage. The chisel marks left on the surface of these fluid shapes are simultaneously traces of the act of making, and a symbolic representation of the conscious effort to grasp indeterminate images.
Learn MoreChiharu Nishizawa
Born 1970, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. Following his graduation with a major in Painting from the Fine Arts Department of Tokyo Zokei University, Nishizawa continued to work in the medium of printing, but moved to painting as he felt it was quicker at giving form to his thoughts. Having had a solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Gallery in 2003, won an award at VOCA in 2004, his work became critically acclaimed for its combined expression of unease towards society with its dark humor. In 2005 he held a solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery, and continued to garner attention on the international stage with solo exhibitions in Hong Kong and Seoul. His work is known for its detailed, model-like depiction of crowds of people wearing suits or aprons against flat, unreal backgrounds. With his collaboration at Steinway Japan and a museum exhibition being held in Germany, he is continuing to make exciting developments in his work.
Learn MoreTakeshi Hayashi
Takeshi Hayashi was born in 1956 in Gifu Prefecture. After completing his graduate studies at the Tokyo University of the Arts, he stayed in Paris as a Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) overseas research fellow from 1998 to 1999. In 2024, he retired as a professor in the Department of Sculpture at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2012, he won the Enku Award at the 6th Enku Grand Award Exhibition for Daichito Kyomei – Sozono Genfukei (Earth and Resonance – the Root of Creation). Hayashi's artistic activity involves taking stones of varying sizes and shapes, and arranging them so as to explore the relationship between the stones, as well as the relationship between the stones and the space that surrounds them.
Learn MoreHiroyuki Matsuura
Hiroyuki Matsuura was born in Tokyo in 1964. It was SUPER ACRYLIC SKIN, an exhibition of Matsuura’s works at Tokyo Gallery in 2005, that marked his transition from designer to artist. Matsuura has gone onto lead an active career both in Japan and overseas, and broadened his repertoire to include the media of painting, sculpture, and print. In 2017, Uki-uki (2012), a 4-metre high work by the artist, was exhibited at Cool Japan: World Fascination in Focus, an exhibition hosted by Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden and Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and served as the main image used to advertise the exhibition. World Fascination in Focus subsequently travelled to Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp, where it was well received.
Learn MoreDanshaku Miyazawa
Danshaku Miyazawa’s work was selected for inclusion in the “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2004” open call exhibition organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2004. He has held both a two-person exhibition together with Nozomi Kobayashi (2008) as well as a one-man show (2010) at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Tokyo), in addition to participating in numerous art fairs. Miyazawa uses countless fine lines and circles with a pencil, as well as blots of water-color to depict human figures with ambiguous, undefined forms. These images are not fixed to the pictorial surface, giving viewers the impression of constant flux and movement – just like the respiratory “comings and goings” of living beings. Miyazawa’s paintings are metaphors for the fickle, transient and uncertain moods of the contemporary human condition.
Learn MoreShigeki Yoshida
Shigeki Yoshida was born in Ibaraki, Japan in 1963. He studied painting at Wako University in Tokyo. After graduation, Yoshida pursued his early career as a painter and had several solo and group shows in Japan, Korea and Thailand. In 1997, Yoshida was awarded a fellowship by the Japanese government and came to New York. Yoshida enrolled in the Hunter College MFA program where he studied photography with the late Prof. Mark Feldstein and Prof. Roy DeCarava. Yoshida also studied with Prof. Katharina Siverding at UDK in Berlin as an exchange student. Yoshida earned his MFA in 2005, and now lives and works in Brooklyn.
Learn MoreWang Shuye
Wang Shuye was born in China’s Heilongjiang province in 1963, and graduated from Beijing’s Central Academy of Craft Art (now renamed the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University) in 1989. That same year, his graduation work won the Gold National Award for Excellence, the highest honor awarded by the Ministry for Trade, Education and Industry. In 1990, Wang came to Japan and spent the next ten years devoting himself exclusively to the spiritual pursuit of art, exhibiting no work until his 2001 solo show in Kamakura. Since then he has been showing his paintings mainly in Tokyo and Kamakura, in addition to holding a retrospective exhibition at the Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art in 2009 entitled The Affirmative Vision – The World of Wang Shuye. Wang took a leading role in organizing Neo-Moroism exhibition held at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Beijing) in 2013 by contribuiting a theoritical essay for the catalogue. Today, Wang continues to live and work in Kamakura, producing paintings that are informed by subtle yet tenacious executation and persistent spirit of inquiry.
Wang’s paintings, often covered by a mass of countless brushstrokes, use this layered technique to depict profound scenes of tranquil beauty. These visual spaces represent a world that exists prior to becoming a subject of our awareness. Standing in front of these large canvases, the viewer is freed from the constraints of the present moment and discovers the existence of another, more mercurial space and time. Although he used to work mainly with Chinese ink and pencil, Wang began using oil paint in 2007 in order to explore new directions in his artistic practice. By giving up his reliance on outlines and contours, Wang has enabled his vision to draw ever closer to his chosen subjects – so much so that he seems to approach the very essence of their materiality.
Ye Jian Qing
Ye Jianqing was born in in 1972 in Zhejiang, China. Ye is a doctoral graduate of and current professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).
Ye is best known for his works which melds the painting tradition of the Song period with contemporary modes of visual perception: demonstrating a ‘holistic perception’ and a ‘distanced’ way of observing nature. His works often depict a sort of a natural utopia permeated with ‘vital’ energy.
Ye’s works have been shown and collected at notable public institutions worldwide including the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) and Los Angeles County Art Museum (LACAM). He is a former recipient of the Okamatsu Scholarship & Prize.
Zhu Jian Zhong
Zhu Jianzhong was born in in 1954 in Nantong, Jiangsu, China. Zhu graduated from the Nanjing University of Arts, focusing on traditional Chinese painting, in 1982
Zhu is best known for his ink paintings reflecting blue and green hues. His works are characterized as subtle, unobtrusive and dignified.
Zhu has been awarded the Nanjing Chinese Painting Exhibition Prize, the Four Seasons Fine Arts Exhibition Prize. His works are included in the collections of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) and the Jiangsu Art Museum.