Ascending Art Annual Vol.3 “Singing Life, Swelling Heart”
I visited “Ascending Art Annual,” a series held at Spiral Garden that showcases primarily young women artists.
“Ascending” carries the meaning of rising, and the exhibition series was conceived to broadcast, through art, the “spiralling, ascending image” embodied by Spiral’s architecture.
Organized by Wacoal Corporation, its aim is to contribute to elevating the sensibility of women living today toward beauty, thereby working toward the realization of a “company that empathizes with women.”
This edition features three artists: Maki Ohkojima, Yurie Kawagoe, and Yuriko Sasaoka.
Maki Ohkojima
Maki Ohkojima presents four whale-motif pieces first developed as a large-scale installation for her solo show “The Whale’s Eye” at the Aquarium de Paris in France, plus one new work.
Focusing on the “whale-fall ecosystem” — the ecosystem formed when a dead whale’s body sinks to the deep sea and is consumed by other creatures — she dynamically depicts the cycle of life and the flux of all things using materials such as acrylic, crayon, and spray paint, along with plastic and fishermen’s nets found on the shore of Awashima in the Seto Inland Sea.
The scale of the whale works, drifting in an atrium roughly 15 meters in diameter, is dynamic.
Yurie Kawagoe
Eighteen recent works were on display, including her signature piece “Weakling Specimens” (2013), shown at the 7th edition of “Aperto,” the solo-format exhibition series organized by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and “Specimens of Jealousy” (2015), in which insects with red bumps signifying jealousy sit lined up on their backs.
She reframes the human feelings of jealousy, loneliness, and weakness — negative emotions at first glance — into the fantastical forms of insects, arraying them as specimens and thereby placing them in relative view.
Human emotions mimicking the specimens of insects appear unreal at first glance, yet the red bumps gradually began to prick at the eye. If something appears when the emotions writhing in the human heart take on visible form — that thought stirred me.
Yuriko Sasaoka
On show is the video installation “Gyro,” which won the Grand Prize at “Kyoto Art for Tomorrow 2019 — Kyoto Prefecture Rising Artists Selection.”
Sasaoka speaks of how we Japanese, though repeatedly struck by natural disasters severe enough to be called “the devil’s doing,” have still deeply loved and forgiven nature. This work centers on the keyword “forgive,” depicting a lavishly colored world with devils from various religions as its motif.
