18 September to 16 October 2021
Opening reception: 18 September 2021 | 4 – 6 PM

Kaneuji Teppei
Nakahira Takuma
Miyajima Tatsuo
Suga Kishio
Sugito Hiroshi
Takamatsu Jiro

Our real lesson is to abandon our own relativity and thought on self-essence, and to start a conversation with the world. In order to do that, we must devote ourselves to the world, compromise with the world, have the courage to let the world abuse us, and go beyond the world to build a new realization of ourselves.

– Nakahira Takuma, “The Destruction of Individual, the Excess of Personality”, 1969

Each Modern will present “Kirikae: From Mono-Ha to Simulationism”, an exhibition that reviews the transformation of ideological trends and forms of post-war Japanese art from the 1960s to 2000s. As the opening show of the gallery’s new space and an extension of the exhibition “PROVOKE- Opposing Centrism” at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, “Kirikae: From Mono-Ha to Simulationism” starts from Provoke (Nakahira Takuma) and Mono-ha (Suga Kishio) to Takamatsu Jiro, Miyajima Tatsuo of Tokyo Simulationism, and the perceptive interpretation related to Simulationism by Kaneuji Teppei and Sugito Hiroshi. Through this exhibition, Each Modern tends to introduce the development of Japanese contemporary art from a research-based perspective and artworks that have impressive values on the market, and to present how the artists from the changing time attempted to break through the existing forms and the world, and to explore the possibility of expression.

The exhibition starts with Nakahira Takuma’s large photographic installation “Kirikae”. First exhibited in Osaka, 2011, “Kirikae” is composed by 283 color photographs of fire, water, birds, animals, trees, flowers, houses, and people. Because Nakahira photographed what he sees in his everyday life, there were critics categorized him as the new “intimate photography”. However, these continuous and repetitive daily objects were photographed in a way without metaphor, adjective, and expression that generates a sense of touchable texture, saturated color, strong contrast, and clear contour. The objects are now existing as an extremely pure still life, which is different from the memory, the narrative, and the emotion of the intimate photography. Every existence is what it is. “Kirikae” is the most important editing and installation of Nakahira’s late color photography. Some works from “Kirikae” is collected by The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and some were exhibited at Mori Art Museum. The show will present 94 original works from the series published in 2011.

Similarly, Mono-ha artists tend to display natural and industrial materials, such as stone, earth, wood, paper, fabric, and steel plate. They can be used individually, and also can be used collectively. The natural objects are no longer being seen materially. They now have a significant value of existing. Among the Mono-ha artists, Suga Kishio is one of the few artists who is still creating until now. We can still discover the original insistence of Mono-ha in his latest works. Meanwhile, the painting series “Shadow” by Takamatsu Jiro, the artist who also became the core figure of Japanese art in the 1970s, connects Mono-ha, Dadaism, and minimalism to arouse the paradox between creation and interpretation of the subject. Takamatsu expanded his thought on the essence of the material beyond the physical, recognizable world, like how the “Shadow” series showed no subjects, but only the result that the unseen subjects caused.

Miyajima Tatsuo is a key artist that coheres the Japanese post-war avant-garde art and contemporary art. He has been seen as a post-Mono-ha artist as well as a Tokyo Simulationism artist. Miyajima claims that an “independent and absolute existence” - pulls out from the human body and sees beauty as a conjunction of space and time that has nothing to do with the human being. The exhibition will show his latest number machine and conceptual scripts of his installation started form the 90s. The two artists related to the new Simulationism, Sugito Hiroshi and Kaneuji Teppei, work on two different aspects. Sugito Hiroshi came from the “Delicate Era” in the late 1990s Japan. The materiality and emotion in his paintings have approached an extreme expression of Japanese perception. Sugito Hiroshi will present new works specially made for this exhibition. Made his mark in the early 2000s, Kaneuji Teppei presents the physical and mental absence of the Millennials through daily objects. In a time and space that is different from post-war Japan, Kaneuji Teppei inserts the projection of people to his art and thoughts about the objects, which also reflects the complexity of the objects in the contemporary world.

Sponsor | Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government