Yumiko Chiba Associates is excited to present the gallery's first staging of a solo show by Yasuko Watanabe, an artist whose practice to date has traversed multiple mediums including felt, paper, photography, and video.
Taking travel and maps as her starting point, Watanabe concerns herself with questions of boundaries and distance, movement and transgression to make works in which the corporeal/physical and spatial/epistemological dimensions intertwine. Though manifesting in exceedingly simple form, with their multiple scales layering and expanding, and their dynamic reversals of distance and direction, Watanabe's works possess a kinetic oscillation of boundary and place and promise of spatial transcendence that seem to crystallize the experience of "travel."
A MAP THEY COULD ALL UNDERSTAND features handmade felt works that take as their motif an origami boat known as a "damashi bune" or "trick boat," and works using photographs as their materials. Sponsored by the Tokyu Foundation (former Gotoh Memorial Foundation), the exhibition is being held to show the outcome of Watanabe's sojourns abroad as a result of having received a Gotoh Cultural Award for an emerging artist.
