Dan Isomura “LOVE NOW”
Dan Isomura is an artist attracting attention as an icon connecting society and art.
On this site as well, we have repeatedly reported on his recent activities.
A solo exhibition by that very Dan Isomura is now set to open at the gallery “EUKARYOTE.”
The show, “LOVE NOW,” gathers his works addressing themes such as the LGBTQ community and immigration, framing them as trans-boundary engagements with the unknown Other.
Dan Isomura has been active both in Japan and abroad in recent years, with projects including his solo show at On Sundays (Watari Museum of Contemporary Art) in 2017, residencies at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei and Wat Pai Rong Wua temple in Thailand, a collaboration for the Keith Haring 60th Anniversary event, and “NAKAMA de ART” launched at the initiative of Shingo Katori.
Marking one year since his solo show at On Sundays (Watari Museum of Contemporary Art), this exhibition condenses Isomura’s activities over the past two years. The figures of the damned in hell — added to over the course of the exhibition period — are one of the major bodies of work Isomura has been developing continuously in recent years.
The figures of the damned — inscribed with charges such as “the sin of homosexuality” and “the sin of having no nationality” — have an oddly gentle presence. Placed on the same ground as us viewers, they suggest a world in which good and evil might be reversed.
Concrete-based Buddhist statuary, which took root rapidly in Thailand from the 1970s onward, brings into view both the fabric of Thai society and the wider world it stands against, while at the same time hinting at forms of Buddhist art — and of art itself — that might have taken hold in Japan.
The show will also feature new drawings, a re-installation of the collaborative work “HOME PARTY, 2017” made with Nepalese residents in Japan, “Joss Paper for the lovers, 2018” — which Isomura, himself a member of the LGBTQ community, created around the theme of same-sex marriage in Taiwan — and “LOVE NOW, 2018,” which developed out of that work.
Growing out of his earlier work, which took up sources of social unease, and layered with keywords such as LGBTQ, immigration, and religion, Isomura’s recent practice is here reframed as a trans-boundary engagement with the unknown Other. “LOVE NOW” is also a call to update the social conventions and paradigms of our time — under which “LOVE” is constrained — and to make the impossible possible.
– The figures of the damned that Isomura has been continuously making since 2016 draw inspiration from “hell temples,” a new form of hell imagery that took hold in Thailand from the 1970s onward. Hell temples are temples that contain a space of hell composed of three-dimensional figures. Depictions of hell in Thailand were originally rendered on flat surfaces such as murals, but in the contemporary era they came to be presented as spaces of hell that we can physically enter.
Representing what is heterogeneous within a paradigm is done across all countries and eras, and “hell” has played a major role as one medium for it. By the most up-to-date methods of each era, hell has been depicted again and again, and each time it has laid bare the character of that era. And now, it seems to me that Isomura is taking on precisely that role.
Existing “boundaries” — between country and country, gender and nationality, life and death — are softly broken down, mixed together and dissolved through Isomura’s interpretation. In “LOVE NOW,” we will be able to witness that process first-hand.Message from Ms. Ayaka Mukuhashi (doctoral candidate, Graduate School of Art History, Waseda University; research theme: representations of hell in Thai Buddhist art)
Overview
Dan Isomura
LOVE NOW
Venue: EUKARYOTE (3-41-3 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 12:00 – 19:00 Closed: Mondays
Dates: November 30 (Fri) – December 24 (Sun), 2018
Opening Party: November 30 (Fri) 18:00 – 20:00, 2018
Talk Event: December 1 (Sat), 2018, 19:00 – 21:00
Dan Isomura (artist) × Ayaka Mukuhashi (doctoral candidate, Graduate School of Art History, Waseda University; research theme: representations of hell in Thai Buddhist art)
