RYOTARO MURAMATSU

— Ryotaro Muramatsu

The Whitestone Gallery is delighted to announce Ryotaro Muramatsu’s solo exhibition Fluffy. This marks his first solo exhibition in Taipei and his third solo exhibition with Whitestone following shows in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Five projection mapping works will be displayed alongside two sculptures. The exhibition commences on January 12th and concludes on February 3rd, with the opening reception scheduled for January 26th at 4pm, where the artist will be present.

Since founding the creative company NAKED, INC. in 1997, the Tokyo based artist has led projects in various fields such as film and video production, spatial presentation, local revitalisation, and traditional Japanese arts. The films he directed have received 48 nominations and awards at film festivals around the world. He began creating works as a solo artist in 2018 and since has exhibited art both within Japan and overseas. In 2020, he launched an international art initiative DANDELION PROJECT that aims to unite people’s prayers for world peace by ‘planting’ interconnected dandelion sculptures in locations around the world. At the G7 Hiroshima Summit in 2023, he created and showcased artworks at special events hosted by the Prime Minister and First Lady of Japan.

The two Mini Dandelion sculptures are the first collector’s piece born from DANDELION PROJECT, the artist ongoing art initiative where people send each other prayers for peace through interconnected dandelion objects exhibited worldwide. The different seeds are designed based on actual seeds of various flowers, expressing the diversity of a coexisting world. Gold leaf and platinum leaf are meticulously applied by Japanese craftsmen using traditional techniques.

The fluttering cherry blossoms in the artwork Chill signify both the end and the beginning. As viewers or the occasional bird or butterfly approach, the blossoms turn pink, reflecting the changing light in rain, sunlight, and haze. The most transient and beautiful moment of the cherry blossom lasts forever in this piece. The artwork Kaleido Jellyfish captures the enigmatic yet divine beauty of jellyfish through mosaic patterns which are automatically generated from images the artist photographed at important times in his life. The artist’s memory is converted into art and keeps changing forever like a kaleidoscope inside the Jellyfish. Land and sea, existence and nonexistence, life and death. The shore is a borderline where two worlds meet within a fine, unceasing ebb and flow of energy. The tides begin to rise as the audience approaches, evoking a sense that life both blossoms and vanishes at this ambiguous borderline. Two works, Circle of Life and Kaleidoscope, are projected on lithographs. The delicate patterns they depict symbolise the depth of life and the microcosm of the macroscopic world, respectively.