Showing concurrently in the front space of the gallery, the artist Shinnosuke Yoshida will exhibit a mix of old and new works. He has received top honors in the 2009 Shell Art Awards. For this new show he has undertaken the challenge of producing five large-sized paintings, using canvases measuring 2273 millimeters (approximately 7½ feet) on their longest sides.
Yoshida's works are set apart by the presence of artificial structures. He remains constantly aware of the fact that environmental destruction is a negative aspect of humanity, as is their self-centered quality. Thus, encountering the consequences of these tendencies in nature induces a deep, candid response in the artist. This strong emotion becomes the motive for his work. Many of his works employ a motif of artificial, manmade structures. These include various types of constructions, from golf practice ranges, to dams, to retaining walls meant to hold back landslides.
In the painting which took the grand prize in the 2009 Shell Art Awards, entitled "In a Sea of Trees," Yoshida uses a zigzagging wall to divide the picture plane, while leaving the image devoid of human presence. However, be it for good or bad, the artist has expressed that he still has an interest in humans, if only as the creators of such unnatural structures. "An individual person's forms, facial expressions, movements, clothing, personality, feelings, and the like, are not what I want to draw. Perhaps I don't have an interest in people as individuals." It can be concluded that what the artist is ultimately looking for is the final result, the artificial structure, rather than the individual processes and efforts that went into building it.

Artist Comment
"I enjoy the countryside and often go out driving in it. At times I am met with such strange spectacles that I am taken aback. I'll find a highway cutting elegant lines on steep mountainsides, notice that there are tall metal towers marching along ridgelines, or realize that there is a dam towering over the valley bellow, all looking, despite their source in humanity, as if they are a natural part of the landscape. From these distant objects, I feel the echoes of reassurance and of human presence, which lead to a strange dissonance and then discomfort. These realizations, which are rarely encountered while in the midst of modern city life, leave me stunned and unsettled.
"Perhaps I do have an interest in people after all"
Shinnosuke YOSHIDA, 2010

Yuichi Hirako is an award winning participant in the 2009 Shell Art Awards. He has worked in Japan since 2006, and has shown in GEISAI and the Tokyo Wonder Seeds Exhibition. Born in Okayama Prefecture in 1982, he graduated from London's Wimbledon College of Art in 2005.
"Memories of My Garden," his newest show, is filled with images whose scenery and subjects have a foreign atmosphere. Creating paintings of deep forest vegetation, Hirako inserts humans into the midst of this environment as if their heads and hands are part of the plant life. These elements working together convey a sense of floating in a place unknown. Although Hirako paints situations reminiscent of a fantasy story, that ambiguous sense of nowhere remains suspended, creating a fleeting glimpse of a mysterious world which defies definition. The planned exhibition will contain an installation of plants and about ten oil paintings, shown in the inner area of the gallery.

Artist Comment
"I noticed that weeds have sprouted in the potted plants left alone in the garden, ivy has gained a foothold in the wall, and the lone tree has grown up to lean against the building. For me, this is a happy state of affairs."
Yuichi HIRAKO, 2010