GALLERY MoMo Projects is pleased to present a group show, Closed Association, features four contemporary artists: one student, plus three who have just started their professional carries.

The history of contemporary art is a constant evolution of expression that reflects and foresees changes of society, often mediated through materiality of objects. The recent global culture has seen a radical transformation from the ideas of modernity into post-modernity, demystifying our everyday world allowing no sanctuary. The exhibition takes the Georges Bataille’s notion of ‘ritual’ as a pivotal point of reference, and selects four contemporary artists from the youngest generation today who, through their artistic practices, reveal hidden semiotics in the perception of their reality. Closed Association is a mind-altering presentation to unleash Tokyo’s art scenes from the spell of modernity.

The exhibition comprises artworks by four artists: Ayumi Oshima (b.1990), Azusa Kamei (b.1984), Megumi Utsunomiya (b.19**), and Ryuichi Akada (b.1988).

Ayumi Oshima’s performance refers to the history of avant-garde music and witch-hunting. In this work, Oshima set up a circle of candles like a spiritual barrier, and within it installed a variety of tools hinting to black magic, such as a battered hammer, saw, a sickle and bones of the animal’s skull. The scene reminds us of a horror film, culminating the tension to nightmarish destruction and slaughter. Through performing live, Oshima promotes unpredictability and contingency in the presence of the audience.

Azusa Kamei presents works of hybridity between sculpture and painting made of wool and fabric. She creates cut-out pictures of internal organs referring to her own disability, a physical state that she cannot escape from. Kamei’s work is a voice against suppression, in which her deliberate use of textile confirms her artistic intention breaking with ‘the feminine mystique.’

Distinct in her use of colours, Megumi Utsunomiya’s installation is a mixture of painting, sculpture and contemporary experimental music. Her work emphasises on the repetition of sign, a parallel relation between time and sculpture, or an imaginary entrance to the alternative world infused with abstract landscapes. Utsunomiya explores into further possibility of her artistic media incorporating her sense of history and a natural passage of time.

Ryuichi Akada takes a step farther from the Japanese avant-garde toward dematerialisation of artwork, by converting shadow - the alibi of our being – into a visual sign. The work explores into our social relations that have both temporal and spatial, and documents the aggregation of chance encounters in a given time and space. By archiving people’s silhouettes into memory, Akada captures ever-changing moments of our being.

Closed Association is participated by the artists born in 1980s and 90s, and coincides with the group exhibition, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: From Interactive To Interpassive (Gallery Momo Ryogoku) presented by the older generation born in 1970s. The exhibitions are organised by Stanley Project, London.

*image (left)
Each time, 2013
clock, tape, H.230 × W.230 × D.35mm
©Ryuichi Akada

Courtesy of Gallery MoMo