Taka Ishii Gallery (Kiyosumi, Tokyo) is pleased to present a group exhibition, ‘Open Ended Propositions’ with Ei Arakawa, Takashi Ishida, Ushio Shinohara, Naoyoshi Hikosaka, and Minoru Hirata.

"If painting is a medium strictly defined by its flatness and materiality, performance art is fundamentally predicated upon interdisciplinarity. In this sense, performance art constitutes a more open-ended proposition.
If a painting is completed when a painter puts her brush down, a performance work may never be completed. When the act is finished, it disappears. Yet a documentary photo or video is left to form its afterlife. In this sense, performance art exists as a more open-ended proposition.
Artists have pursued, and will continue to pursue, performance art as open-ended propositions.
We then must also see and understand performance art as an open-ended proposition."

- Reiko Tomii, August 30, 2011
(Translated by author from the Japanese original)

For this exhibition the gallery has received the cooperation of New York-based art historian Reiko Tomii, in providing the title of the exhibition and writing the supporting commentary for each of the exhibiting artists. Please take this opportunity to view the selection of exhibited works which assert the positioning of performance within the historical context of post-war Japanese art.