EXHIBITIONS
Everything but…
Each of the participating artists in “Everything but…” capture still and radically decontextualized moments, creating a suggested narrative that expands far beyond the imagery itself. Meaning in an artwork can only be read if the viewer can read the image beyond what is captured. Tomozawa’s work photo-realistically presents staged moments of absurdism, thus captivating yet perplexing the viewer. Ichibayashi’s work fabricates fantastical scenes of seemingly historical events, playing with the anthropological relationship between reality and mythology. Kumakura’s paintings incorporate historical references, depicting the adversities that humans endured to develop civilizations. But the intentional unclear relationship between these motifs leaves the viewer in a befuddled state. Specific moments and images present us with two messages, a message concerning the event represented and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.
―Artist Statement―
Kotao Tomozawa
There is not one single fantasy inside these paintings.
I do believe that things that are actually happening in this world hold the greatest power
The “ooze” that increases every time I paint is difficult to explain with logic.
It forms the traces of my very existence.
Slime is never stable; it keeps flowing and changing form.
There is a silence that stretches out infinitely before and after the instants captured in my paintings. That silence may conceal both the emptiness and powerfulness of the real world in which we exist.
Hokuto Ichibayashi
I believe that events that take place inside virtual world and the scenery there reflect a world that both resembles and rejects the real world. Either way, the reality we apprehend through the screen could be seen as ironic, and uncertainty about an inescapable future also rains down on us. At the same time, however, from this painting, we can also come across an illusion that what we are seeing is a legacy of the past. Events that happened in the past have been preserved in historical sites and writings and passed down to us in the present day. The details we can interpret from past records, the future we can predict from virtual worlds—this painting, which depicts both history and a virtual world, may hold hidden clues for a breakthrough to new problems we are facing in the real world.
Ryoko Kumakura
I mainly paint images that emerge from the process in which people tried to make sense of the world throughout history. While some of those images are absurd and wrong when viewed from contemporary scientific perspectives, they were once indisputable truths formed as a combination of their imagination and the things they could actually observe. Those theories were born, updated, and became outdated along the way to arriving at our current way of looking at the world. The things that have remained as history account for only a tiny portion, and beneath the surface, there are many layers of things that have been forgotten or abandoned.
In my work I create motifs based on images I have collected and paint pictures from those motifs. It is a matter of re-exploring their forms. It is also an act that traces the very process of repeated trial and error in which people seek out the contours of the world. Through such painting, I want to create works that allow a glimpse of the things that have been accumulated behind that image.
ARTIST PROFILE
KOTAO TOMOZAWA
Kotao Tomozawa was born in 1999, in Bordeaux, France, she lived in Paris until the age of five. Tomozawa came to Japan in 2004 and is currently studying at Tokyo University of the Arts, majoring in oil painting, while also participating in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Tomozawa’s unique portraits, combining slime-like materials and organic motifs, realistically depict texture, translucency, and softness, leaving an unforgettable impact once seen. Tomozawa’s works, in which extreme cruelty is wrapped up with the utmost gentleness, have many facets like an extract of this world boiled down, but the expression itself is extremely simple.
In 2019, Tomozawa formed the art unit "Tororoen" with her own mother, Mimiyo Tomozawa. In the same year, she won the Kume Keiichiro Prize, and in 2020, she was selected for the Art Plaza Grand Prize at the University of the Arts. Major exhibitions include "caché" (Hankyu Men's Tokyo tagboat) and "Tagboat Artshow" (Hankyu Men's Tokyo) in 2021, "remix" (3331artschiyoda) and "Pomme d'amour" (3331artschiyoda) in 2020. Pomme d'amour" (mograg gallery), "MIND THE GAP" (THE blank GALLERY).
HOKUTO ICHIBAYASHI
Hokuto Ichibayashi was born in 1992, in Ishikawa, Japan. He graduated from Kyoto Seika University, majoring in Japanese painting.
After graduation, Ichibayashi continued to create Japanese-style paintings, but changed his style from the medium of Japanese-style painting, which focused on handling natural objects, which he had studied at university, to using more artificial materials and expressing them with his own colors. The reason for this change in medium was that when he went to sketch natural objects as his motif, he felt the beauty of the images of natural objects that he saw on the LCD of his PC, which he had been familiar with since childhood, rather than seeing them in person. In his paintings, he uses a video game-like composition to depict social and historical content, and by having the characters that appear on the screen involve things that modern people cannot act upon, and by having characters that do not resemble humans involved in fictional settings, he is able to depict events on the screen that have nothing to do with modern people in a way that is somehow linked to current events. By doing so, he depicts events on the screen that have nothing to do with modern people in a way that is somehow linked to current events.
RYOKO KUMAKURA
Ryoko Kumakura was born in 1991, in Tokyo and currently lives and works in Tokyo. Kumakura graduated from Tama Art University with a major in oil painting in 2014. She creates paintings based on the images that people have created throughout history. She is interested in the history of trial and error that led to the construction of people's worldview, and focuses on themes such as unconscious bias, what lies outside of cognition, and what the visible world is today. By crafting her own motifs and then going through the process of painting, she incorporates her own biases towards the original image, as well as the hand habits and distortions that occur during the manual process.
Major exhibitions include "coniunctio," a solo exhibition at The Imperial Hotel Plaza MEDEL GALLERY SHU, Tokyo (2019), "Pseudomer," a solo exhibition at RED AND BLUE GALLERY, Tokyo (2018), and "DI-VISION/0," a two-person exhibition by Ryoko Kumakura and Tenyo Nagai at TAV GALLERY, Tokyo (2018). Kumakura was selected for the 2019 Gunma Biennale for Young Artists.
OVERVIEW
- TITLE
- Everything but…
- DATE
- April 6 - May 22, 2021
- Opening Hours
- 12:00-18:00
- CLOSED
- Sun, Mon, and Public Holidays
- Opening Reception
April 6 17:00-20:00
- ADDRESS
Tokyo International Gallery
TERRADA Art Complex II 2F, 1-32-8 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, 140-0002 Japan- ACCESS
- 8 minutes’ walk from Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit Rinkai Line “Tennoz Isle Station”, 10 minutes’ walk from Tokyo Monorail Haneda Airport Line “Tennoz Isle Station”, 8 minutes’ walk from Keikyu Main Line “Shinbanba Station”