Ayane Eguchi “Viscera of the Vast Land”
We visited Ayane Eguchi’s solo exhibition “Viscera of the Vast Land.” The venue is Roppongi Hills A/D Gallery on the 3rd floor of the Roppongi Hills West Walk.
Ayane Eguchi is an artist who graduated from the Graduate School of Kanazawa College of Art. As of April 2020 she is a painter based in Tokyo.
The exhibition presented new oil paintings, watercolors, and three-dimensional works created during her most recent year-long residency in Indonesia.
Eguchi has had many opportunities to show her work overseas. This solo exhibition is her first in Japan in seven years, since 2013 — a rare occasion.
The largest work is 《Viscera of the Vast Land 2020》, from which the exhibition takes its title.
What is most striking about Ayane Eguchi’s work is the picture surface, where the sensual texture of oil paint is left to breathe. While she often draws on animals and plants as motifs, she seems to translate their biological breath and movement into the very materiality of paint.
Due to the response to the novel coronavirus, this exhibition closed after only a few days.
Together with this article, Ayane Eguchi has sent us the following message. We hope you will read it alongside the exhibition photographs.
Last year, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, I saw the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. Cows and goats are slaughtered as offerings on the spot, prayed for, and eaten. It was the first time I had actually seen the just-cut viscera. The string of glossy sacs falling from the goat’s belly was beautiful. They were subtly different from the organs I know only as knowledge. They looked more like the corals of the sea, or the plants of the land.
From then on, I began to think about viscera.
Why is it that the sea, the plants on the earth, and human beings all have the same forms?
The desire to turn everything inside out and see the viscera that are normally hidden — that desire, when it met the sea, the flora and fauna, the culture, and the street graffiti of Indonesia, fused into these works.The Roppongi Hills complex is currently (April 8 – May 6, 2020) closed under the state of emergency, but if the closure is lifted the exhibition will be extended from May 7 to May 24. If the world is a better place by then, please come and feel the writhing viscera in person.
And even if not, I will make new works, so I look forward to seeing you again.Message from Ayane Eguchi (dated April 14)
