'Statement from galleries - Focusing on a new generation in Tokyo 2012'

Noh is a Japanese unique traditional performing art with stylized action, dance and chants, developed by Zeami (1363-1443). Noh actors put on masks tohide their facial expressions. By doing so, they let the audience imagine the expressions. Noh actors themselves don't communicate with the audience. Instead, with their own bodies, they act spirits or souls that come and go between the actual world and the world after death. Noh can be said a metaphor for the Oriental idea that the visible is supported by the invisible. In Asian contemporary art, a support or background for painting could often be seen as something Oriental, and the painted surface as omething Occidental. It suggests that Asian art embraces an ambiguous world between the Orient and the Occident. Nagai Masaru depicts a boy or girl with a noh mask and a guitar (of Western origin) to state that we are living in between the traditional and the modern. Noh can be said a form of expression highly Japanese in that it's performed without direct description or narration. Nagai Masaru uses Oriental technique and material (pigment and cashew applied on cotton mounted on panels) to render Western motifs.
written by Ueda Ueda