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Silent Echoes: Collection Exhibition II
Events
Written by In the document   
Published: September 17 2011

Tsuruko Yamazaki, "Sapphire", 2004
artist collection
Copyright© YAMAZAKI Tsuruko
Courtesy of the artist and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her – the real plain her.*1

“Silent Echo: Collection Exhibition II” makes a special presentation of L’echo and Mistelpartition by TSE Su-Mei, an artist born in Luxembourg whose work resonates deeply with the world of music and human life conveyed by the above quote from Carson McCullers’s novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. This exhibition reveals possibilities of the museum collection that have seldom been discussed before. Through selected works from the museum collection, we highlight an artistic world created through a complete fusion of self, technique, and the world, which is exemplified by L’echo and Mistelpartition, artworks based on a process of connecting and blending a wide variety of phenomena related to the body, sound, technique, and the self.

This show refers to a new vantage point that has emerged in recent years, a concept that might be called “craft-like formation.” It is based on a new way of evaluating artistic expression, appreciating art and artistic acts developed “as a result of intimate dialogue between makers and their materials, nature, the environment and the other, and the complete immersion of the maker in the process through which objects come into being.”*2 We reexamine the art and artistic acts derived from a dialogue with self, other, and material in the work of TSE Su-Mei, Anish KAPOOR, AWAZU Kiyoshi, YAMAZAKI Tsuruko, KUZE Kenji, and KADONAGA Kazuo. Their work shows great strength as well as sensitivity in its quiet dialogues and resonances, telling stories of ways that people engage with and live in this world and revealing new possibilities and hope for living through troubled times.

Notes
*1. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mariner Books, p. 118.
*2. FUDO Misato, “In the Process of Becoming”, Alternative Paradise, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2005, pp. 8-11. On the recent development of a theory of craft-like formation, see MURATA Daisuke, “Ron Mueck: Form as Dialogue”, Ron Mueck, Foil, 2008; “Anti-Gravity Structure – The Form as ‘History of History’”, Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History, Shinsozai Kenkyūjo, 2008; “The Form as ‘Knit Cafe in My Room”, “Knit Cafe in My Room” by Mitsuharu Hirose and Minako Nishiyama, 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, 2009; “What Would Hiroshi Sugimoto Do? What Would Museums Do? Deified Artist and Museum: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘History of History,’” AAS-ISS Joint Conference, 2011 (http://www.asian-studies.org/Conference/index.htm).

Artist Profile:
AWAZU Kiyoshi
Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1929. Died in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan in 2009. Awazu Kiyoshi studied painting and design by himself. He won the Japan Advertising Artists Club Award for his poster Bring the Sea Back in 1955. During the postwar period, he took a leading role in Japanese graphic design to lay its foundation. His sphere of activities in terms of expression has been beyond specific genres – painting, sculpture, photography, film, theater, performance, music, literature and architecture. In recent years, his foresight to see the future of artistic expressions involving the totality has been highly recognized. After the 1980s, turning his keen critical eye to a hazardous state of human lives, he created a character named H2O EARTHMAN as ‘a child prodigy living in the 21st century.’ He pursues the question of human existence in the totality of all forms of life. (FM)

KADONAGA Kazuo
Born in Tsurugi, Ishikawa, Japan in 1946. Lives in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. While aspiring to be a painter, Kadonaga came across conceptual art and started to make works using wood. He established his style in the 1980s making works with wood, for example, scraping bark off a cedar log and sliced it horizontally, or cutting the log into small blocks and reconstructing it back to the original log shape. Even when he uses other materials such as glass, paper and bamboo, artificial processing is kept to minimum, and he consistently maintains an attitude of visualizing the natural feature of the material and the production process of the work. (YE)

Anish KAPOOR
Born in Mumbai, India in 1954. Lives in London, UK. After spending his childhood in India, Anish Kapoor went to England at the age of 17. In the 1970s, he began to create artworks, and at the beginning, he produced many three-dimensional works covered with pigments on the surface. Later, he began to make objects, which look like a cave entrance or a crack in the earth, covering the inside of a crevice or hole made in the bedrock-like floor with pigments. His works constructed with varied materials always urge us to reconsider our vision and usual perceptions. In the unknown world generated beyond dimensions, Kapoor’s own views on human existence and life are reflected. (MD)

KUZE Kenji
Born in Awara-cho, Sakai-gun, Fukui, Japan in 1945. Lives in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. Kuze Kenji graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art, where he majored in Industrial Design. He grew up in a pottery family and has been interested in pottery making since his high school days. He has a clear philosophy with regard to ceramic expression in general as product design and art making, and as an artist seeks to create forms that express the essence of phenomena in the context of the relationship between himself and the material clay. Since the 1960s he has established his own unique vision of ceramics as a pure plastic art while also responding keenly to the times, participating as a standard-bearer for the younger generation at the “Contemporary Ceramic Art: Canada, USA, Mexico and Japan” exhibition (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1971), which showcased international trends in post World War II contemporary ceramics. Major series include “Package”, “Trace”, and “Falling”. (FM)

TSE Su-Mei
Born in Luxembourg in 1973. Lives and works in Luxembourg and Paris, France. TSE Su-Mei has lived with music since childhood. The diverse world of artwork she has created is based on the connecting and blending of many elements at the core of musical performance such as the body, sound, technique, and self. Musical elements appear directly in works like L’écho, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and Mistletoe Score, and there is an emphasis on worlds or forms created by fusing materials, self, technique, and subject m atter in handmade works that take the form of sculpture or installation. In recent years, she has extended this approach to a greater variety of creative activities, including outdoor sculpture in public places. (MD)

YAMAZAKI Tsuruko
Born in Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan in 1925, where she also lives and works. Yamazaki Tsuruko was a founding member of the Gutai Group, which was formed in 1954. She later participated in the establishment of the Artist Union and has taken part in solo and group exhibitions where she has presented a range of works including three-dimensional pieces made using sheets of tin, performances, and paintings. Throughout her decades-long career, Yamazaki has produced work on the themes of real and virtual images and sight/cognition/recreation that expresses her unique outlook on the relationship between the individual and the world. (MD)

* FM: FUDO Misato・MD: MURATA Daisuke・YE: YOSHIOKA Emiko

* The text provided by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.


Period: Saturday, September 17, 2011 - Sunday, April 8, 2012
Venue: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Last Updated on September 17 2011
 

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