TANADA KOJI

Mizuma Art Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of TANADA Koji’s solo exhibition Bandung Sketches on Wednesday 6th April.

From 2012 to 2013 Tanada’s solo exhibition Rise toured the Nerima Art Museum in Tokyo and the Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo, offering an all-encompassing presentation of 20 years of his practice. As suggested by its title, the exhibition collectively expressed the idea of - and the hope for - Japan’s continuing advancement and ascension, even in the face of adversity.

Tanada’s work always moves with the tide of the times, and the artist’s deep intellectual curiosity took him to new shores in October 2015 to Bandung, capital city of Indonesia’s West Java province. This exhibition will present twelve new works produced his two-month residency there, comprising boy and girl torso sculptures.

The torso series is a place of experimentation with new expression, and a means to quickly reflect fresh emotions and ideas. As such, the artist remarks that these torsos have a sketch-like existence within his practice.

It is clear that making work within an unfamiliar environment involved considerable challenges, but these sculptures which have been carved into existence within the assimilated atmosphere of Bandung have also built up a sense of sincere dialogue with the wood of their construction, which is all from locally grown trees in Indonesia. We can glimpse traces of new encounters and discoveries, as well as the breadth of shared perspectives between Tanada’s Japanese identity and his wider identity as an Asian, which pervade these works of his hands.

Together with the torso series one further piece will be presented: a figural sculpture created upon the artist’s return to Japan, in pursuit of his memories of Bandung. This bracing, standing figure appears to resist gravity as she transcends both time and space, seeming to embrace all that surrounds her.

Mizuma Art Gallery looks forward to welcoming audiences to discover what Tanada has seen and felt during his search for points of confluence and difference that arise between environments and cultures.