HRD FINE ART

Introduction

HRD Fine Art has been forced to close its door to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic since February 2020. Now, although the pandemic is far from over, we will resume our exhibition program from this coming October, focusing on domestic artists.

The first exhibition after the restart will be a solo exhibition of Ayako Kurihara titled "I Am Here, There and Everywhere: Mind Games 2020." It's been two years since we showed Kurihara’s work last at the gallery ("The Game Must Go On" in 2018), and this will be her second solo exhibition to be held in Kyoto.

Born in 1974 in Yokohama, Kurihara graduated from the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in 1999. Now based in Yokohama, she has been actively participating in exhibitions, artist-in-residence programs, and art festivals in and outside Japan.

The series titled "Mind Games," which forms the core of this exhibition, involves a popular board game called "Othello" or "Reversi." Using gridded surface and paints in two colors, Kurihara places one color after another alternately, according to the rule of the board game and using the technique of stamping or dropping, until all the boxes are completely taken up. She has been working on this painting-performance series quite a long time now, and sometimes she invites the audience to take part in the game, performs live-painting, or creates and shows video work as well. Through these works, Kurihara visualizes many aspects of and perspectives related to "human communication."

This exhibition aims to present new viewpoints toward society and the mode of human communications that are undergoing transformation amid the pandemic of the new coronavirus, with "remote," "social distance," and "partition/separation" as key phrases. The artist mainly showcases her works in a variety of media as an installation taking up the whole gallery space.

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Artist's Statement

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we are now seeing less and less opportunities for physical contact and face-to-face communication, and we can't help but think anew about the distance and distancing between us, people.

Why do we desire to contact with each other? And why do we desire to avoid contact with each other at the same time?

In this exhibition, I scatter my works all over the gallery that are marked with these opposite desires of mine: the desire to stay alone, keep myself away from the outside world; and the desire to take contact with others through digital screens - by remotely playing the game of Othello using the Internet and social networks.

I am here, there, and everywhere. So are you.

- Ayako Kurihara