artKYOTO 2024

Yae Asano

Tilt

Yukako Sorai

Yoshimasa Tsuchiya

Fukuo Tanaka

Kengo Nakamura

Yae Asano  (1914-1996) was born in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, and was based there for the rest of his life, except for three periods of military service away from Japan. Asano became interested in Western avant-garde art in adolescence through works and art books owned by a poet Riichi Noda. Meanwhile, Asano said of the art movements of the time: “I am not quite surprised. Noh and kabuki are surrealistic and have been around in Japan for a long time”, and he became self-taught in the pursuit of abstract expressions of the Japanese cultural climate. He picked up his paintbrush again in 1945 after demobilisation, and he devoted himself to painting from 1959, when he resigned from his job at a local credit union. Asano continued to work in his studio, which was a small cigarette shop by the front door of his house. His reputation grew along with exhibitions in Japan and abroad near the end of his life, and he was also a visiting professor at Aichi University of the Arts from 1987 to 1990. Asano’s work is known for the technique “scratch”, which he developed around 1957. He scratches or scrapes the surface with a nail or knife in a drypoint-like process before the white ground dries, and he fills in these scratches with matted black. Aware of monochrome as his own world, the sharpness of his searing lines evokes the beauty and harshness of the natural order.

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Tilt is a graffiti artist from Toulouse, France. He first encountered the graffiti movement in the 1980s and painted his first tag on a skateboard ramp in 1988. Tilt broke with the pop-art bubble style after a long period of practising traditional and fetishistic graffiti, in favour of a more deconstructive direction. The rawness and aesthetics of graffiti were interpreted as subversive, rebellious and anarchic and were not always accepted by society early in his career, but he is now more willing to gain recognition from a wider audience with his anti-aesthetic work. The traces of impermanence, chaos and gestures of the urban environment are depicted in powerful colours and forms in Tilt’s work, and the graffiti legacy functions to evoke former underground expressions and memories. Tilt emphasises the partial nature of graffiti by spray-painting on a large wall and then breaking it up into individual pieces. As if it were cut directly from the wall, the realism and scale of the work attracts many fans, and it sets Tilt apart from other artists who simply reduce and reproduce images from the wall onto canvas. 

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Yukako Sorai completed her postgraduate studies at Musashino Art University in 1994, and she worked as a textile designer at the Japan Wool Textile Company, where she was in charge of planning and developing textiles, blankets and felt materials for clothing from the same year. She became an independent artist in 2008 and actively exhibited her work in Japan and abroad, and she was included in an exhibition “Symphony of Art - Festivities of Images and Materials” at Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi in 2024. Sorai has been fascinated by the animal-like movement of wool and working with felt since her school days. After layering and thickening the felt, she gouges out parts of it by hand, or drills holes in it, making use of the regularity and distortion of the cross-sections to reveal the hidden colours and shapes. Sorai’s organic abstract sculptures are based on motifs of space, plants, stones and cells, in which you can see the ever-changing life. In addition to abstract works, she also uses man-made objects such as pots and vases as motifs. The felt and silk fibres give them a unique presence, shifting our perception of everyday objects.

Dates

October 31-November 3, 2024

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Open to the Public

October 31, 10am-4pm

November 2, 10am-4pm

November 3, 10am-3pm

*Preview will be held for invitees and the press on October 30.

*Closed on November 1.

*Last admission is 30 minutes before closure.

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Shōsei-en Garden
Booth: Rofutei 02
Shomen-dori Ainomachi Higashi-iru, Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto, 600-8190 Japan

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info@megumiogita.com