Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Beijing) is pleased to announce “Projection of Site/Sight”, an exhibition by Trinh & Buscher and Shinichi Kaneko.
Trinh & Buscher is an artistic collective comprising Vietnamese-born, Australian-bred artist Chauntelle Trinh and German-born artist Eckard Buscher. Both Trinh and Buscher studied design and architecture at university and founded the collective in 2006. Since then, they have been working on projects that fuse architecture, design and art. This exhibition showcases works from their Urban Topography Collection series, which began as the first part of their “Metropolitan Cityscape” project.
The Urban Topography Collection is a series of exquisitely detailed two-dimensional stainless steel city structure made using an elaborate etching technique to depict aerial views of the world’s largest metropolitan areas within a 3x3km framework. Trinh & Buscher paid actual visits to various cities, spending up to two weeks in each place to record the urban landscape. Using this detailed information as a basis, the urban patterns that govern the lives of the local people and their spatial configurations are extracted to create two-dimensional representations from the perspective of an observer. Trinh & Buscher refer to their working process as a “visual translation”. Using highly advanced and experimental techniques, they synthesize their personal spatial experiences of each region with their works.
Shinichi Kaneko was born in Tokyo in 1961. After graduating from Pasadena City College in 1983, he began working as a freelance photographer. Kaneko founded Quinientos Inc. in 2000. While focusing mostly on commercial photography, he also creates photographic works that depict geometric forms, and continues to show his work at exhibitions both in Japan and abroad.
The forms found in both his “Torso” and “Unbalance” series, both of which are on display at this exhibition, were all made by Kaneko himself. These objects, which have been constructed in three-dimensional spaces, are projected onto two-dimensional surfaces using his lens. These projection drawings create the illusion of a geometrical abstract painting, making obvious allusions to the fictitious nature of photography. This fictitiousness also influences his working process. Kaneko begins by imagining the line of sight he will use when shooting a photograph. Taking this as a starting point, he then builds the precise, rigorous models that will appear in his work. His working method raises serious questions about customary photographic processes, in which the subject to be photographed is determined first.
This exhibition will consist of two parts: “Urbanscapes (Re)imagined” by Trinh & Buscher, and “Parallel World” by Shinichi Kaneko. It will be the first exhibition in China for all three artists. The common thread that runs through all of these works, perhaps, is their attempt to translate three-dimensional sites of visual and spatial experience into two-dimensional media. The concepts and methods developed over the course of each artist’s handling of specific issues promise viewers the opportunity to reassess the relationship between two- and three-dimensional media.
