The
Splendid
Mountain
Hiro Hiro Art Space is pleased to coordinate with Tomio Koyama Gallery to present “The Splendid Mountain”, a group exhibition of works by Aya Ito, Tomoko Nagai, and Keisuke Yamamoto.
In the field of art, we recognize the shared premise among artists: the ambitions to break the limitations of time and space. If we could imagine our lives with a compass without its forthright needle or a measuring instrument without units, would we become further immersed in the world created by artists? A world of balance, melody, and perception expressed through elements of geometrics, light and shadow, and colors.
As we walk into “The Splendid Mountain”, we try to understand how each of the three artists disassembled the elements of reality accordingly to their personal context and reconstructed into a new horizon.
There is a strong sense of weightlessness when you stand in front of Aya Ito’s work, like a lens that is trying to focus properly, attempting to concentrate on the image it is capturing. This comes from the artist’s creative behavior of “performance of meaningless”. In the process of creation, Aya Ito randomly placed paper, pottery, cloth, furniture, etc. to create a diorama, and then observed it from different angles through a camera-captured picture. This allows her to find new and unpredictable perspectives of composition that looks imaginative and surreal yet completely captured from reality. The bright contrast of those intense colors thoroughly compares to the effect of a spotlight, where such a production process creates a whole new reality with extremely high density.
©Aya Ito, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
In scenes of forests or rooms depicted by Tomoko Nagai, many animals, children, and plants of various appearances have become motifs. Breaking the rules of space with her unique sense of spatial and dimensional property, she lays out a piece of painting, as if you are looking at a fantasy-themed stage play. A dazzling array of images are intricately overlapped, just like the richly condensed worlds in fantasy stories. When the audience views each piece of the work, they are also looking at the memories of their fantasy as they experience the sense of drama and melody the painting brings.
©Tomoko Nagai, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
Keisuke Yamamoto once commented on his work, “I am very interested in the history of human creations and their creative impulses. With this in mind, I created sculptures and paintings that work in collaboration with one another.” For his works in recent years, he collected many ancient tools that have been forgotten and discarded, sensing, and pondering over the historical traces they hold, as well as the insignificance and fragility of human existence. Through the use of personification, familiar to the Japanese, on the interpretation of all things, these tools that were originally used for other purposes had been nurtured and presented into a new life with a primitive power and soul, where its historical significance had transformed and been enclosed within.
©Keisuke Yamamoto, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
“The Splendid Mountain” seems to have magic, or hidden deep treasures, for people to be so fatally attracted to it. Art is just like so.
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