YUSUKE ASAI

Yusuke Asai never stops drawing using everything before him as materials for his work. For example, dirt and water gathered from locations of his site-specific work are used for his “mud paintings,” marker drawings on masking tape that has been pasted onto walls like flourishing flora are employed in his “masking plants”, and white sheet material used for road marking lines are burned onto streets to create Shokubutsu ni Natta Hakusen（white lines that transformed into vegetation. These are all methods the artist uses to “draw.” While Asai’s works are very distinctive, they do not give an impression of having been produced in a complicated manner. This is because his works are a continuation of his daily act of drawing, unrestricted by time, places or materials. This very lack of constraints in the places he draws and the materials he uses may be the driving force that has been leading Asai to select methods for creating works that can only be made on specific sites.

In Japan and abroad, Asai has created numerous works by comprehending spaces, accepting the features that come with a certain location, and letting his hands move naturally, as if they were dictated only by the correlation between the materials he uses and his work sites. Spread across various locations, the artist’s works connect his past presence at each site, and continue to exist in the relationships and feelings woven through these locations. If one were to consider the material permanence of Asai’s works, his use of mud that can be washed away with water and application of masking tape that can easily be peeled off would seem incongruous. However, the memories and the act of drawing within each of his works, which have accepted their respective fates of eventual disappearance or continued existence, remain stronger than any material.

Asai reconfirmed his creation process through his huge mud painting installtion measuring 5m in height and 34m in length that was on display at the Rice Gallery in Houston, Texas, as his first overseas solo exhibition titled yamatane (2014). In addition, the artist says that he acquired a taste for and grasped the sense of sculpting spaces at Rokko (Rokko meets Art 2014, Hyo-go, Japan), where he created a canvas in the air with masking tape by observing and understanding the spaces that appeared between branches at a botanical garden, which was the site of his installation. In his solo exhibition Creating Here (2014) at ARATANIURANO, Asai successfully integrated all of his experiences and skills in a white cube setting. He created an installation with masking tape and blue ink that occupied the gallery’s empty space--instead of using only the walls.

Spaces that appear through works like “masking plants” where drawings actually branch into areas beyond the confines of gallery walls are nest-like environments for Asai. They can be considered as a realization of “places where the artist can become engrossed in the act of drawing.” Asai’s works that have been generated through different methods are starting to overlap with his desire towards “drawing,” which has been cumulating inside of him. The next development in the environment he has been pursuing is about to burgeon.