“Painting, and…” Vol. 3
I visited the third installment of “Painting, and…,” a project curated by Mika Kuraya of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The venue is “gallery αM,” run by Musashino Art University.
For the earlier Vol. 2 by Uso Fujishiro, please see below.
As the project’s title suggests, it asks how painting relates to reality. The blank space held within the title is like a vessel prepared for artists and viewers to fill in on their own terms.
“Painting, and…”
Vol. 1 Teppei Soutome: April 7 (Sat), 2018 – June 2 (Sat), 2018
Vol. 2 Uso Fujishiro: June 16 (Sat), 2018 – August 10 (Fri), 2018
Vol. 3 Kyoko Murase: September 1 (Sat), 2018 – October 27 (Sat), 2018
Vol. 4 Masaya Chiba: November 10 (Sat), 2018 – January 12 (Sat), 2019 (winter break Dec 23 – Jan 7)
Vol. 5 Kazumi Nakamura: January 26 (Sat), 2019 – March 23 (Sat), 2019
Kyoko Murase
The artist Kyoko Murase was born in 1963. From 1990 to 1996 she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, and has been active in numerous exhibitions in Japan and abroad.
The series “Painting, and…” asks how painting can engage with the reality that has unfolded since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. But Murase has lived in Germany for more than twenty years since 1989 and did not experience the earthquake directly. Reading her statement, one can sense that distance.
Statement — Kyoko Murase
I believe in the images I can see.
But truthfully,
I don’t see them. Or rather, I never was seeing them.
The ears heard.
Cicadas — how many years since I heard them?
For a long time I lived through summers where no insects sang.They come pouring down from the sky at overwhelming volume,
like the sound effect of a spacecraft landing.
I stoop a little.
Evening higurashi, surging in from deep in the mountains, making me dizzy.
Middle of the night, insects tap at the window and my chest throbs.
Did I die?I am nowhere anymore.
So I extend my antennae, quivering finely, carefully.
Becoming a sea cucumber sunk to the ocean floor,
I must listen for the distant shore.September.
I want to try hanging “Millennium Cave” in that place underground.(3) The overview of the senses draws on: Muneo Mitsuboshi, “Rethinking Distant and Near Senses,” Bulletin of the Institute for Humanities Research, No. 44, Kanagawa University, 2010, pp. 73–88.
The energetic brushwork seems to make the works look larger, with a sense of real dynamism. At the same time, the soft palette lends a gentle tone.
The paintings seem to ask you to imagine “something” that isn’t contained within them. I felt they demanded a mode of viewing that savors the blank space of the work.
