Tetsuro Kano was born in 1980. He received MFA at Tokyo Zokei University in 2007. He has been focused on residency-based projects where he produced site-specific installations. In his artworks, he creates landscapes by combining natural objects such as seeds and fruits and readymade items or the manmade products such as his own sculptures. With elements that elude human control, for instance, birds released in one of his installation pieces, his works make our values uncertain and spark our imagination for non-human creatures and organisms that we share our habitat with. His recent exhibitions includes Naturplan, Bloomberg Pavilion Project Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011), Clear signs, Vivid tones, HARA MUSEUM ARC, Gunma (2012), In Search of Critical Imagination, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka (2014), Naturea / Ideals, shiseido art egg 9th Exhibition, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2015).

Yu Yasuda was born in 1982 and completed his MA study in oil painting at Musashino Art University in 2007. With contemporary sensibility on the traditional form of art, oil painting, Yasuda creates dream-like landscapes in virtue of inimitable strokes and colorful layers of paints. In this exhibition, Yasuda is presenting new works of untitle, his recent and the most abstract project in the ongoing Nameless Landscape series. His recent exhibitions includes VOCA, Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (2008), Art in an Office, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2011) and RYUGU IS OVER!!, Ryugu Bijutsu Ryokan, Yokohama (2012). Lately, he was commissioned public art at the entrance of Toranomon Hill, completed in 2014.

The landscape created by Kano’s installations and Yasuda’s paintings draws our attention to painterly aspects of a sculpture and sculptural aspects of a painting and sculptural representationally and abstraction in paintings. Kano derived the exhibition title from Idealism and Pragmatism indicating actual application of the ideals or idealistic practices. Paintings and sculptures apparently contradict each other in terms of their natures such as figurative and abstract, as well as ideal and practical, respectively. However, when you look from a distance at them facing each other and attempting to be abstract themselves in order to become ideal, they contain both aspects that seemingly contradict. With their collaboration, these two artists will take us to new landscapes.