GROUP EXHIBITION

The exhibition brings together Kazuto Imura, Yuan Fangzhou, Ryunosuke Okazaki, Takuto Kawabata, Ittetsu Tsuji and Akihiro Hasegawa, artists who work in entirely different mediums. Each artist engages closely with their chosen materials, drawing on their particular qualities to develop their own distinctive artistic practices. We invite you to discover how these different approaches resonate with one another.

The six artists in this exhibition each work with distinctive materials and methods, exploring the relationships that arise between objects and people, body and space, the visible and the invisible.

Material is not something passive that simply follows the artist’s intention. It cracks, bends light, yields to gravity, exceeds human strength and at times betrays the artist’s will, leading to unexpected expressions and meanings. At the same time, their practices are not closed within matter itself. Through long dialogues with their materials, they weave in memory and prayer, time, the presence of others, narrative and the sacred.

This exhibition presents the practices of six artists who keep their hands moving as they travel back and forth between matter and spirit, work and space, meaning and what comes before meaning.

This exhibition marks the first curatorial project by artist Akihiro Hasegawa.

Hasegawa usually works within the confines of the two-dimensional surface. In this exhibition, he turns his attention to the space that extends beyond it and to the things that exist there.

Works on the wall and works on the floor, matter and matter, and the margins left between them. Together, these elements shape the balance of the exhibition space.

The title What Matter Says perhaps captures the artist’s unique perspective on the relationship between works and space. Rather than viewing space from the standpoint of the viewer, it invites us to consider it from the perspective of the things that occupy it.

In this exhibition, works by the artists who have captivated Hasegawa share a single space, each with its own material, form and way of being. What does each material have to say for itself?

We hope you will come and sense it for yourself.

Text by Ichiko Kameyama. Courtesy √K Contemporary, Tokyo