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Yukie Ishikawa + Akane Saijo Exhibition
Blum
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Yukie Ishikawa, Akane Saijo
Blum is pleased to present a two-person exhibition with Tokyo-based artist Yukie Ishikawa and Kyoto-based artist Akane Saijo. Alongside this presentation, the gallery is proud to announce Saijo’s representation and the premier of Ishikawa’s new Tsukishiro series.
With a nearly-thirty-year age difference, these two Japanese artists both seek to subvert cultural norms and the traditional usages of their chosen medium. Ishikawa began making paintings as a critique of Japan's consumerist society in the late 1980s and 1990s. In her later career, she has continued this quietly contrarian spirit with her Impermanence series. With these works, she reworks her own, previously finished canvases into intricately layered, shifting compositions rooted in Japanese aesthetics to bypass the flat, horizontal and vertical grids that were often utilized by Western modernists. Saijo, in her Phantom Body series, marries the seemingly disparate disciplines of ephemeral performance and tactile clay sculpture. Introducing spaces for the body into the ceramic medium’s delicate constitution, Saijo defies art’s standard practice of severing the object from the suggestion of touch.
In her earliest work, Ishikawa took imagery from various forms of printed matter—notably advertising from magazines—and enlarged, projected, and traced them onto the canvas as abstract forms that were barely recognizable compared to the original imagery. This exhibition features two works from the 1990s that the artist added to in 2008—Impermanence 2009 (2009) and Impermanence 10 (2008)—which contain elements from a cup noodle or spaghetti advertisement. It was in 2008 that Ishikawa began to devise a way to transpose the idea of impermanence into an abstract geometric language. Revisiting unfinished works from the 1990s and 2000s, she added layers of lines and grids. Later, she began creating completely new canvases with this technique. This dense layering prevents the eye from settling in any one area or focusing on any one zone of spatial depth—a principle rooted in Japanese ink painting and ukiyo-e prints. This fluidity stands in opposition to the more rigid compositions popular amongst Western painters in modernism.
This exhibition marks the debut of Ishikawa’s Tsukishiro series, begun in 2023. Ishikawa explains that tsukishiro translates literally as "Moon-White" and refers to the way the sky gradually becomes brighter and whiter before the moon rises in the east. These works express the longing of those gazing upwards as they wait for the moon to rise on the fifteenth night. The word can also be pronounced geppaku, which refers to a white color with a pale bluish tinge reminiscent of moonlight.
Saijo cites Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inframince—the infinitely small space between or differentiating both people and things—as an important influence for her intricate ceramic work. Saijo delves into and hyperbolizes this phenomenon. Though Duchamp refrained from overtly defining inframince, in notes archived at the Centre Pompidou he describes: “The exchange between what one puts on view… and the glacial regard of the public… Very often this exchange has the value of an infra thin separation meaning that the more a thing is admired and looked at the less there is an infra thin separation.” The negative spaces in Saijo’s sculptures complement the positive space of the human body, and the artist often collaborates with performers to engage with these orifices in her ceramic works. The artist’s forged forms engulf the performers—their mouths or entire bodies—as they breathe into the work’s holes to create sound. With these activations, the space of inframince, the miniscule separation between the work and the viewing body, is pushed to its utmost limit and nearly eliminated.
The body—as commingled with ceramic—is also an integral portion of the construction of these works, as it has been since the inception of this medium. Working the clay with her hands, Saijo combines various traditional techniques to construct her clay bodies—unfettered by the question of art versus craft that is often applied to handmade ceramics created in the contemporary period. With her intensive research practice and educational background in ceramics, Saijo seamlessly merges art’s conceptual concerns with technically skilled craftsmanship.
With a nearly-thirty-year age difference, these two Japanese artists both seek to subvert cultural norms and the traditional usages of their chosen medium. Ishikawa began making paintings as a critique of Japan's consumerist society in the late 1980s and 1990s. In her later career, she has continued this quietly contrarian spirit with her Impermanence series. With these works, she reworks her own, previously finished canvases into intricately layered, shifting compositions rooted in Japanese aesthetics to bypass the flat, horizontal and vertical grids that were often utilized by Western modernists. Saijo, in her Phantom Body series, marries the seemingly disparate disciplines of ephemeral performance and tactile clay sculpture. Introducing spaces for the body into the ceramic medium’s delicate constitution, Saijo defies art’s standard practice of severing the object from the suggestion of touch.
In her earliest work, Ishikawa took imagery from various forms of printed matter—notably advertising from magazines—and enlarged, projected, and traced them onto the canvas as abstract forms that were barely recognizable compared to the original imagery. This exhibition features two works from the 1990s that the artist added to in 2008—Impermanence 2009 (2009) and Impermanence 10 (2008)—which contain elements from a cup noodle or spaghetti advertisement. It was in 2008 that Ishikawa began to devise a way to transpose the idea of impermanence into an abstract geometric language. Revisiting unfinished works from the 1990s and 2000s, she added layers of lines and grids. Later, she began creating completely new canvases with this technique. This dense layering prevents the eye from settling in any one area or focusing on any one zone of spatial depth—a principle rooted in Japanese ink painting and ukiyo-e prints. This fluidity stands in opposition to the more rigid compositions popular amongst Western painters in modernism.
This exhibition marks the debut of Ishikawa’s Tsukishiro series, begun in 2023. Ishikawa explains that tsukishiro translates literally as "Moon-White" and refers to the way the sky gradually becomes brighter and whiter before the moon rises in the east. These works express the longing of those gazing upwards as they wait for the moon to rise on the fifteenth night. The word can also be pronounced geppaku, which refers to a white color with a pale bluish tinge reminiscent of moonlight.
Saijo cites Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inframince—the infinitely small space between or differentiating both people and things—as an important influence for her intricate ceramic work. Saijo delves into and hyperbolizes this phenomenon. Though Duchamp refrained from overtly defining inframince, in notes archived at the Centre Pompidou he describes: “The exchange between what one puts on view… and the glacial regard of the public… Very often this exchange has the value of an infra thin separation meaning that the more a thing is admired and looked at the less there is an infra thin separation.” The negative spaces in Saijo’s sculptures complement the positive space of the human body, and the artist often collaborates with performers to engage with these orifices in her ceramic works. The artist’s forged forms engulf the performers—their mouths or entire bodies—as they breathe into the work’s holes to create sound. With these activations, the space of inframince, the miniscule separation between the work and the viewing body, is pushed to its utmost limit and nearly eliminated.
The body—as commingled with ceramic—is also an integral portion of the construction of these works, as it has been since the inception of this medium. Working the clay with her hands, Saijo combines various traditional techniques to construct her clay bodies—unfettered by the question of art versus craft that is often applied to handmade ceramics created in the contemporary period. With her intensive research practice and educational background in ceramics, Saijo seamlessly merges art’s conceptual concerns with technically skilled craftsmanship.
Schedule | May 18 (Sat) 2024-Jun 22 (Sat) 2024 Opening Hours Information
Opening Reception May 18 (Sat) 2024 17:00 - 19:00 | ||||
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | https://blum-gallery.com/exhibitions/yukie_ishikawa_akane_saijo | ||||
| Venue | Blum https://blum-gallery.com/ | ||||
| Location | 5F Harajuku Jingu-no-mori, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku , Tokyo 150-0001 | ||||
| Access | 1 minute walk from the Takeshita exit of Harajuku Station on the JR Yamanote line, 2 minute walk from exit 2 at Meiji-jingumae Station on the Chiyoda and Fukutoshin lines. | ||||
| Phone | 03-3475-1631 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it  |
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