Tokyo Wander Site: "Silent Voice" opening & artist talk

Artist Talk. Left to right: Marwa Arsanios, translator, Kyungwon Moon, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook.

Tokyo Wonder Site opened their latest exhibition "Silent Voice" that showcases the works of four artists: Marwa Arsanios, Nesrine Khodr, Kyungwon Moon and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. With the exception of Moon's oil painting Green House #3 (connected to her HD film Superposition), all the works are either video or video/animation installations. The show will be on through December 12.

"PSYCHOANALYSIS: Gazes on Photo and Video Art from Austria"

Markus Schinwald, Ten in Love, 2006, 35mm film on DVD, 4'37"

The Tokyo Wonder Site in Shibuya is hosting an exhibition of (mostly) video and photo art by eight Austrian artists. The show examines how the country's psychoanalytical heritage, that came to be seen as one of its biggest cultural imports, relates to the varying notions of "Metropolis." The Vienna and Vancouver-based duo Bitter and Weber are represented by several digital collages where urban images are comprised of typographic symbols and letters. Their images feature an interplay of patterns that change depending on the viewer's proximity and the level of visual concentration; same goes for Maria Hahnenkamp's lush pigment prints. Architectural settings of Aglaia Konrad's and Andrea Witzmann's respective video and c-print contributions can alternate between functioning as main subjects or auxiliary elements. Dorit Margreiter's Pavillion (2009), a 35 mm film, scrutinizes the intersection of architecture and gender, while Ursula Mayer's Fallen Imperial video installation from 2003 focuses exclusively on gender—perhaps an inevitable nod to the discourse born of the investigations into the psyche of the sexes. I particularly liked Markus Schinwald's room where the Ten in Love video (2006) provided a futuristic backdrop for the wistfully old-fashioned representations of obscurity in his 2007 wood and metal sculpture Legs (Untitled), and the 2010 pigment prints of Lukas, Magnus, Nicklaus and Gunter. The latter echo Max Klinger's prefiguration of fetishism in his 1881 series Ein Handschuh (A Glove).

This project is a part of the Austria-Japan Friendship Year which rendered several other quality exhibitions. There is also a handsomely printed bilingual catalogue available for purchase.

Wonder Seeds 2010: Katsuhiro Maeda

untitled (無題)

2009　

230mm×230mm

アクリル・顔料インク・紙

Copyright (c) Katsuhiro Maeda All rights reserved.

Amongst the one hundred budding artists, showcased in this year's Wonder Seeds exhibition held at the TWS in Shibuya, there are several whose works could grace the walls of Tokyo's better galleries. More or less arbitrarily, I would like to comment here on two of them. The first is a graduate of the Tama Art University Katsuhiro Maeda (class of 2002). The painting on display at the Wonder Site (each participant was represented by a single entry), was a non-objective composition in which small colorful shapes outlined in black were floating above the gilded Nihonga background. Because the wooden panel that served as the support was not varnished, the combination of these matte shapes with organically reflective gilding was highly contrasting and, at the same time, complimentary. Maeda found a very successful way of combining traditional Japanese art with contemporary investigations of space and color: neither upsets the internal balance of its counterpart, both are indispensable for the final work.

The second young artist is Hiroko Sasaki, I will do a separate post about her shortly.

The sale of the works from the show is conducted by the Gallery Tagboat.