HRD FINE ART

Introduction

A group exhibition of Japanese artists, titled “Building a Castle of Sand (or Breaking It) - Art from Aichi,” will be held in Seoul in January 2012.

Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music is known as one of major art universities in Japan, having produced a host of internationally renowned artists. In this exhibition four Japanese artists who have had a bond with the University - some studied here and others currently teach here as professor or as lecturer - will be introduced to the art-loving audience in Seoul, in the hope that it will open up a new channel of cultural exchange and better mutual understanding between Korea and Japan through contemporary art, displaying art not from all-monopolizing Tokyo but from Aichi.

Besides the fact that they all have have all connected to the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, works of these four artists (Hisashi Kurachi, Nobuyuki Osaki, Noriyori Shirakawa, and Ayako Kurihara) share a common interest; which can be described as “vulnerability of reality” or “unreliability of what can be seen.” Regardless of the difference of media, ranging from painting to print, from photograph to video installation, all of these artists acknowledge the inherence of “illusion” in visual art and try to use “illusion” in ironic ways.

The phrase used in the exhibition title, “castle of sand,” represents the uncertainty and unreliability of what we can see and touch. However elaborately made, a castle of sand in the beach is no real castle; it’s just a copy of a real castle, an image. What is real about the castle is a myriad of sand, construing the whole but we tend to ignore the existence of sand just until the castle is no more to be found, washed away with the ocean waves. Which is similar to the process of our perception of reality; we incessantly attempt at grasping and concretizing the world as we see in front of us, only to find it is gone already. We repeat this again and again, seemingly without any hope of capturing the true face of the world.

However hopeless and in vain it may seem, it is nevertheless a fruitful and even fun process to build and to break down a castle of sand repeatedly. This exhibition “Building a Castle of Sand (or Breaking It)” aims at visually presenting the meaningfulness of our effort of constructing, nullifying, and re-constructing the shape of the world.

Lectures and talk sessions planned alongside the exhibition will also provide a refreshing opportunity for both the participating artists from Japan and art specialists in Korea to meet new people and receive stimuli for further creation.

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Next Door Gallery
http://www.nextdoorgallery.co.kr/