Nassima Landau Tel Aviv – Group exhibition
Ohayou Gozaimasu Japan
Good Morning Japan
17.3.23 – 27.4.23
Japanese contemporary artists are creating some of the most intriguing and thought-provoking artworks today. Their inventive, bold, and inspiring visions and fresh new ideas converse with the techniques and traditions of the past. Inspired by anime, manga, and the pop culture of kawaii (cute), their art makes a thrilling and diverse realm of creativity, which we are delighted to introduce to our audience.
The exhibition features ten artists, eight women and two men: Misaki Kawai, Hideaki Kawashima, Rikako Kawauchi, Maiko Kobayashi, Aki Kondo, Yayoi Kusama, Kojiro Matsumoto, Masako Miki, Mifuu Oda, and Chiharu Shiota.
Misaki Kawai (b. 1978, Okawa, Kagawa, Japan; lives and works in Copenhagen) is well-known for her exuberant paintings and fluffy sculptures. She moved to New York in 2000, where she developed her take on heta-uma, an illustrative style rooted in manga, whose name roughly translates from Japanese as «bad but good.» Her bold, colorful, spontaneous, and energetic works often focus on goofy characters.
Hideaki Kawashima (b. 1969, Aichi, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo) uses portraiture to explore the ambiguities of human life. After graduating from Tokyo Zokei University in 1991, he took two years of training with the esoteric Tendai Buddhist sect at the HieizanEnryakuji Temple. His wide-eyed characters float lightly in the air against a plain background, showing a spectrum of emotions: fear, desire, longing. Their androgynous facial features set gender identities in flux, while his small ghost-like creatures symbolize the blurred boundary between physical and spiritual realms. Kawashima’s work resonates with the rich legacy of manga and anime-influenced figuration.
Rikako Kawauchi (b. 1990, Tokyo; lives and works in Tokyo) works with a wide range of media, from drawing and painting to wire, rubber tubes, resin, clay, and neon tubes. Through her work she strives to view the human body from various perspectives, capturing its movements and activities. Motifs pertaining to food and body are intertwined with expressive, pulsating lines that evoke nerves and blood vessels. Inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss’s «mythological logic,» she addresses the mythical world, where boundaries between self and others are indistinct.
In Maiko Kobayashi’s (b. 1977, Yokohama City, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo) paintings, mysterious childlike creatures convey emotional depths. Her characters disclose sadness, joy, fear, and melancholy. Hybrid creatures, half-human, half-animal (whether rabbit, dog or cat), intermingle to highlight their humanity in appearance and postures. Kobayashi’s painting technique is complex. She works in multiple layers, starting with gesso and acrylic on Washi paper or canvas, and continuing with charcoal drawings, which she renders over and over again, redrawing the figures repeatedly.
Aki Kondo (b. 1987, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan; lives and works in Yamagata, Japan) employs bold colors and thick, decisive brushstrokes to reflect on human emotions, while going back and forth between memory, reality, and fiction. Her work is always based on her view of life and death, which she has developed through the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake and other losses she experienced in her life.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo), one of the topmost artists of our time, has worked in diverse media, including painting, collage, sculpture, video, performance, installation, fashion, literature, and music. Infinity and self-obliteration are the main recurring themes in her oeuvre. Obsessive patterns of dots and nets cover surfaces with ceaseless repetition, and mirrors create dizzying spaces that replicate our gaze. Blurring the boundaries between the viewer and the surrounding world, she seeks universal expansion into infinity. A spectacular retrospective of her work was held at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2021.
Kojiro Matsumoto’s (b. 1976, Tokyo; lives and works in Tokyo) depictions of «girls» are inspired by a pictorial method often used for tobira-e (frontispiece) in manga comics, interwoven with the composition typical of traditional Japanese painting.
Masako Miki (b. 1973, Osaka; lives and works in Berkeley, CA) is a multimedia artist whose oeuvre spans felt sculptural installations and works on paper. She frequently delves into various aspects of living between two cultures – the Japanese and the American, merging them into a new entity. Miki remains close to her ancestral traditions, especially those arising from her association with Shinto beliefs and practices, as well as from traditional Japanese folklore. Her large felt sculptures are based on shapeshifting spirits (yōkai), which can disguise themselves in any number of different forms.
Mifuu Oda (b. 1997, Osaka; lives and works in Osaka) creates images of a «girl,» influenced by manga and anime kawaii (cute) images, verging on abstraction. She uses a palette knife and acrylic paint to achieve an impasto effect. Through the way in which she applies the paint to the canvas, Oda conveys her emotions and frailty, projecting herself onto her «girls.»
Chiharu Shiota’s (b. 1972, Osaka; lives and works in Berlin) oeuvre links various aspects of sculpture, installation, and performance art. She is best known for her intricate immersive installations in which she creates vast webs of black or red threads, turning the entire space into a labyrinthine environment. She maps elusive emotions and memory by weaving tangible found object, such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, and boats, into an abstract network. By capturing objects in this way, she spawns otherworldly atmospheric environments, toying with the notions of temporality and dream. In 2015, Shiota represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Curator: Suzanne Landau
is the former Chief Curator of Fine Arts at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1998 – 2012) and former Director and Chief Curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2012- 2018). She is a co-founder of Nassima Landau, based in Tel Aviv. Most recently, Suzanne initiated and curated the retrospective of Yayoi Kusama at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
NASSIMA LANDAU
Located in Tel Aviv, Nassima Landau is a unique platform acting as a foundation for emerging and establishing contemporary art. Founded by Steeve Nassimaand Suzanne Landau, the space hosts multiple exhibitions a year, showcasing international contemporary art in a fresh and dynamic way that is unprecedented in Tel-Aviv.
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