Sometimes we are surprised to know that an unknown persona reside in the artist who we have been associated for years. This persona keeps a distance from happenings in the society no matter how disastrous it might be, cooly observing them and calculating how to construct its picture as a visual art works. This time we have found out this kind of unknown persona in Kenichi Yokono.

His statement for the exhibition, titled "Dancing Eyeballs", says: To me, eyeball symbolizes naked people. They all look at deferent direction and seem dancing randomly and frantically. Still I feel they are all connected and moving together toward some point.

By his "dancing eyeball" works, we can see through how people coped with a huge unexperienced disaster happened in March 11 of 2011. As you know the disaster, nearly 40,000 people killed by Tsunami caused by the 7.9 magnitude earthquake and 3 nuclear power plants exploded at Fukushima, made tremendous impact on all the Japanese and we have been still in confusion. Some stand against Nuclear power plants and the government, some simply get away from the critical zone, where radio active particles heavily fall down, with their young children, some shut themselves and some dare to stay at the destructed or critical zone with some resolution.

Yokono intentionally keeps distance from those circumstances around him and try to get the big picture of "the people in disaster" and to express it as "dancing eyeballs", that is, in his vision, "people are all confused and separated each other but connected somehow and as if moving together toward some direction" The point of his vision is in that he sees connection among people in confusion. We don't. It may well be said that this connection is a fate of human kind, although no one knows whether it will lead us to more socially disastrous place or to a brand new harmonized society never seen before. Yokono makes no judgement on this issue. He just tries to depict as a cool-headed visual artist what we are.

As to the form of the works, you may find out strong Japanese traditional patterns surround eye balls or scull. Yokono's work has been highly evaluated as a well constructed and harmonized Japanese-American pop-mixed one with a tendency toward dark elements within our mind. His recent works, however, are more apt to place a weight on the Japanese patterns. As a result, the works reaches a level of awesomeness. Please expect his exhibition which starts in July.

Courtesy of Unseal Contemporary