Featuring works by:
Emi Otaguro
Masanori Tomita
Nobuya Hitsuda
Yutaka Nozawa
NOBUYA HITSUDA
Born in 1941 in Ota Ward, Tokyo, Nobuya Hitsuda spent his formative years in post-war Tokyo, where the exposed streets bore witness to the city's transformation. Climbing the banks of the Tama River, he marveled at the view of the undeveloped river, shaped by numerous floods. Tokyo's changing landscape during the economic boom left him with a sense of renewal, a theme recurrent in his paintings. Hitsuda's work shows awareness of the Mono-ha and Gutai artists who were active at the same time. He was acquainted with Mono-ha artists like Koji Enokura and Noboru Takayama. His style, involving the placement of motifs on the painting plane and the continuous movement of objects with brushstrokes, echoes the experimental spirit of them. In a manner reminiscent of the Mono-ha movement's endeavor to revitalize Japanese art through installations, Hitsuda revisits the traditional canvas painting, aiming to reshape it into a fresh expression of Japanese artistic form. In addition to these influences, Hitsuda draws inspiration from Japanese and European art across eras, religious paintings, cinema and architecture. His deep fascination with Japanese art is evident in his emphasis on flatness and the use of space, allowing his paintings to continuously expand without a central motif —an acknowledgment of the foundational nature of Japanese paintings. As a respected teacher Hitsuda mentored numerous outstanding Japanese artists, including Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito. Despite his prominence in Japanese museums, he remains relatively unknown outside Japan. His paintings continue to play a crucial role in bridging postwar Japanese painting to contemporary Japanese art.
EMI OTAGURO
Emi Otaguro exhibits an array of artistic expressions by using an eclectic palette of materials such as wet plaster, cardboard, chewing gum, quail's eggshells, vinyl sheets, and galvanized sheets, each meticulously selected to lend a unique voice to her artistic narratives. Otaguro's artistry delves into the intricacies of materiality and support mediums, carefully tailored to the specific tales she aims to convey, all the while adhering to the notion of "flatness" essential to her craft. Within this realm of visual storytelling, these materials emerge as silent but potent narrators, shaping the interpretations of her artworks. Among her signature works, one finds an intriguing exploration with "chewing gum" as a medium. Here, Otaguro employs a meticulous process where multiple sheets of gum are shaped and then delicately "carved" with a cutter, provoking a sense of satisfaction. The result is a paradoxical fusion of initial freshness, characterized by a subtle mint fragrance and the faint vestiges of machine-pressed marks hinting at mass production. Yet, as time unfolds, the ephemeral essence of the chewing gum gradually fades, and the sharp edges mellows, symbolizing the transience of life itself. While chewing gum, often dismissed as a non-nutritive substance, may not directly sustain us during times of emergency, it persists as a tool that enriches the "Ma" ‒ the empty moments ‒ in our bustling everyday existence. Otaguro's motifs, therefore, often center around individuals basking in the sun at a park or beings suspended in the liminal space between wakefulness and slumber, embodying a profound connection to their primal instincts. For her intricate collages, Emi Otaguro works with delicate quail's eggshells. These eggshells bear a unique fingerprint-like quality, imprinted with the internal pigments of the mother bird just before the egg's laying. Each speckled pattern, akin to nature's own artwork, functions as a camouflage, safeguarding the fragile life within from potential threats. Otaguro interprets this as "a landscape painting painted by each quail to reflect their external environment." She carefully shatters quail eggshells into fragments and meticulously reassembles them to create entirely new entities, breathing fresh life into the fragments of a hidden world. Her photographic works, the "sun bath" series are the result of spontaneous, improvisational sessions where she photographs a sculpted piece of gum placed upon the back of a live cat. This unexpected collaboration unfolds in the presence of a stray feline visitor to her studio, emphasizing the serendipitous nature of her art. Otaguro perceives a cat's fur as a unique "channel," a canvas where minuscule dust particles, suspended in the air, and organic residues commingle. These artworks bear witness to the unpredictable actions of a cat and the evolving shape of a piece of chewing gum over time, encapsulating the essence of uncontrollable existence.
MASANORI TOMITA
Masanori Tomita has consistently worked with the extensive freedom, yet complexity, of oil paints to produce his intense creations which may be considered both abstract and figurative. Characterized by his rich matiere and complex colors, Tomita’ s paintings evoke a variety of unspecified concrete images such as human figures, hands, landscapes, flowers, and broken dishes. In viewing everyday things and events in the world as a complicated product of many intricate elements, Tomita attempts to find an opening between these coats of diverse concepts to compose his paintings. He takes careful notice of subtle interactions between his peers for hints and insights as he actively adopts differing perspectives to broaden his field of creations. Tomita’ s habit of collecting, recording, and digesting these small nonchalant moments in his daily life, along with digital images and scenes from manga constitutes a significant aspect of his works. In confronting Tomita’ s paintings, we become drawn into the material presence of his heavily overlapping oil paints. However, in contrast to this bold materiality, the images which emerge from behind the surface emit such ephemerality that it seems as if it could disperse any moment. Tomita captures this sensitivity through his endeavor to depict the present “midway” , which therefore allows us a glimpse of the other side, or form of reality, in a dimension apart from our everyday
YUTAKA NOZAWA
Yutaka Nozawa's works showcase distinctive and whimsical scenes, subtly transforming ordinary moments often overlooked. He constructs a minimalist realm where the perception of personal time becomes mysterious, invoking fragments of distant yet familiar memories through video, photography and sculptures — a personal record of the artist's recollections. Nozawa's pieces are laced with subtle surprises, such as the moment one glances at a clock pointing to 12:34. These surprises allow viewers to spontaneously discern various rules within his artwork, sometimes surpassing the artist's original intent and connecting with individual memories touched by the art. His works blur the boundaries between two-dimensional representation rooted in reality, three-dimensional installation space, and the manipulation of the flow of time. This blurring invites viewers into a world slightly askew from the ordinary, challenging the distinctions among artwork, space, and observer. Nozawa expresses a desire for viewers to "wander back and forth" between his works. He carefully crafts a straightforward and unpretentious stage where neither narratives nor allegories are explicitly contained. Stepping into this exhibition space, a viewer's thoughts momentarily pause, suspended in the air. By oscillating between reality and fiction within Nozawa's curated environment, one may experience a spontaneous shift in their perception of daily life.
