KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to announce Yohei Kichiraku’s solo exhibition Formless, from Saturday, December 17th, 2016.

 

Formless is Kichiraku’s new series based on the intense experience he encountered during his first visit to Europe. Kichiraku, who visited Paris for his book signing at Paris Photo in November 2015, heard the shocking news of the city being under a terror attack the night before his signing session. On the way returning to Charles de Gaulle Airport he even became stagnated on the bus which received a notice of  “a bomb detected ahead,” which turned all passengers into panic and randomly run into nearby houses until they found the report was erroneous. These shocking experiences made Kichiraku vividly conscious that the world we currently live in are based on a mixture of ethnics, each living with their own ideologies and historical perspectives all complexly intertwined and entangled, which for a person born and raised in Japan had no opportunity to actually experience before.

 

In Formless series, Kichiraku describes our world since the November 2015 Paris attack. His concept was conceived right after he returned from his trip to Paris, which then he spent a year to research and prepare. The series consists of works applying Ebru (marbling) on newspapers he collected from across the globe, dated anytime after November 2015. Marbling, which in Japan also known as Suminagashi, has the impression of being a pattern making method that derived in Europe, whilst in fact the world’s earliest marbling has been found in Japan (Sanjuurokuninshuu from Nishihohnganji in Kyoto, is said to be the oldest existing paper-marbling material). Researches state that Suminagashi (Ebru) was originated around the 9th century, which then propagated to Turkey along the silk road, then spread across Europe since the fifteenth century. After returning from Paris, Kichiraku began his studying of the Turkish Ebru method which for now has been over a year.

 

In Formless, Kichiraku features the abstractness and fluidity of Ebru (marbling), which he found in common with the fluidizing globalization of the world we currently are living in. He also drew comparison with the history of marbling which cross-bordered countries and cultures, with the rapidly accelerating digitized society we are now experiencing. For example, war used to have a clear geographic and chronological borderline; where the battlefields are and from which date the war had started, whereas now Kichiraku states from his experience in Paris that “everything seems to be happening through a virtual 'cloud' —even including war."

 

This body of work may also connote notions towards the “formlessness,”—a concept first introduced by French writer-philosopher Georges Bataille in 1929, and re-introduced by the cultural theorists Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois in 1996. This new series, which originated from the ancient Japanese Suminagashi method, could certainly be recognized as an act of informe in its attitude of extracting new context from newspapers that are known as a medium of delivering daily occurrences.

 

We hope that his new expressions based on the own intense experiences and researches would become inspiring experience for all viewers.