EXHIBITIONS

Tokyo International Gallery presents an exhibition
by up-and-coming artist Natsuki Nakayama“From the Riverbed to Visitors”

Tokyo International Gallery (Shinagawa, Tennozu) is pleased to present “From Riverbed to Visitor,” a solo exhibition by Natsuki Nakayama.

Nakayama has consistently contemplated and expressed herself through the different media of painting and film, focusing on the theme of the inner desires of human beings and the conflicts that arise from these desires. In this exhibition, by displaying her paintings and films in the same space, Nakayama presents a new viewing experience in which the static time of the paintings intersects with the continuous montage of time constructed by the films.

As the viewer moves back and forth between the paintings and the film, he or she touches the roots of such opposing concepts as “self” and “other” and “front and back,” and experiences the fluctuations and ambiguities inherent in the human mental structure. By evoking emotions from the colors and brushstrokes of the paintings and superimposing the emotions aroused by the images of the films on the paintings, the exhibition induces an experience of moving back and forth between emotional realms that have no clear contours.

We hope that this exhibition will provide an opportunity for viewers to quietly confront their own inner selves to approach the limits of our essential desires and expressions.

―Artist Statement―

My work is a contemplative act that attempts to touch upon the uncertainty of human existence and the shadows of desire through the mediums of painting and film, which are different mediums. In painting, I use a minimal color palette of red, white, and black to establish the reverberations of impulse and the ruptures of emotion as abstract forms. This act is more than the construction of an image, but an attempt to question the act of seeing itself.

At the stage before form is reduced to meaning, at the point where vision has not yet been captured by language, the senses oscillate precariously. There lurk sensations that blur into silence and the contours of formless desires. In film, I am not interested in a story or a definite subject, but in more subtle and invisible dimensions, such as the interplay of gazes, the distance between bodies, or the viscosity of time. The images do not simply flow, but rather repeat, stagnate, and deviate like memories and desires. In this process, the body appears as an existence exposed to the gaze of others, and at the same time, the ego as the subject of the viewer is shaken.

Between the pleasure and anxiety of “seeing” and the violence and intimacy of “being seen,” film is a device that reflects the complex interplay of human existence. The static time of painting and the continuous time of film. The formal difference between the two is an opportunity for me to question the limits of expression, and at the intersection of the two, it becomes possible to delve into the ambiguous terrain between the visual and the physical, the inner and outer worlds, and the subject and the other.

Through the mediums of painting and film, I am exploring the unspoken territory that lies behind the visual.