Individual Sansui

Tomohito Ishii / Shinichi Takashima + Shu Nakagawa / Taisuke Makihara / Rui Mizuki
Organizer: Ryosuke Kondo (art critic)

Venue: Komagome SOKO

Sat. 15 February – Sun. 8 March, 2020
12:00 – 19:00 daily (Fri., Sat., Sun., and National holidays)
Reception: 18:00 – 20:00, Sat. 15 February, 2020
http://komagomesoko.com/

We are pleased to present Individual Sansui, an exhibition featuring four groups of artists at Komagome SOKO.
Ryosuke Kondo, who organized this exhibition, has been interested in an understanding of nature rooted in East Asia through fieldwork in both Chinese Feng Shui and Japanese gardens, while researching the history of Western landscape. The term “landscape,” derived from the West, is premised on the presence of humans (the subject), whereas sansui originates in China and does not clearly distinguish human beings from nature. Rather than a visible world consisting of mountains and water, it is a symbol of polarities: yang and yin, static and dynamic, tangible and intangible; and it is believed that both humans and nature exist undifferentiated in the chain of things.

Such a perspective of sansui is not limited to East Asia’s view of nature, but is also rich in suggestions for considering art and society in the age of globalization. For example, originals and reproductions that the modern art model regarded as a master-and-servant relationship will be reinterpreted as complementary. In addition, a human agency that is undermined by artificial intelligence and biotechnology may not be a given in the first place. In other words, sansui can be a keyword neither for nationalism nor for criticism against Western modernism but for thinking about the near future.

The four groups of artists in this exhibition are diverse in terms of both mediums and interests, but they share an approach which intuitively seizes everyday objects, and they throw themselves into heteronomous thinking through physical relationships with materials, i.e. matter. The worlds they respectively evoke may be called sansui as a “topos” where people and nature are undifferentiated as substances and actions exist prior to thinking. This exhibition presents such potential of sansui. During the exhibition period, a series of gallery talks will be held with a variety of special guests to further explore the art of sansui.