by Megumi Ogita Gallery Location: Megumi Ogita Gallery
Artist(s): BIDOU
Date: 10 May - 28 May 2011
Bidou (b.1970) had studied under a Noh-mask carver, GENDOU OGAWA and given his name to be independent. While he was working as a professional Noh-mask carver, Bidou also started searching his own expression rather than keep producing traditional Noh-masks. Bidou found his answer by creating masks of people painted in Western great paintings such as Mona-Lisa and A Girl With a Pearl Earring, and revives their faces as new figures reflecting ever-changing humanity.
He considers face not just as a part of body however as a minimized form of a person’s surroundings. It is also a challenge to convert two-dimensional expressions onto three-dimensional masks. Thus Bidou even expresses its antiquity by carefully coping cracks and scratches of the original painting with a special technique of Noh-mask carving.
By wearing a mask, Noh actor often transforms to supernatural characters such as spirits, demons and ghosts then create a stage of surreal time and space where humans usually cannot be a part. Bidou’s masks also give us a miracle experience of traveling two kinds of culture, Western and Easter, in past and presence.