For the first time in 2 years, Nishimura gallery is pleased to present SOYA Asae’s solo exhibition “sora”  in the occasion of the publication of her first art book “sora iro” by Seigensha in connection with her retrospective exhibition at Art Tower Mito from this summer to autumn.

SOYA Asae was born 1974 in Kanagawa prefecture, and conferred a doctorate for painting major of Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 2006. She had painted the bathtub filled with familiar “light” since she was a student, and she won the grand prizes in the exhibition of Showa Shell Sekiyu Contemporary Art Prize 2001 and in the VOCA 2002.
Her first solo exhibition in our gallery “Prism” was held in 2007. Like “Circles” and “Airport” series, she showed the rich and varied expressions of “light” and received increased recognition.
In 2010, the solo exhibition “Ringing” was held in the SHISEIDO Gallery, Tokyo. Under her new theme of the sound images of colors and the echo, she created the large-scale installation composing the various colored cutting sheets like wave patterns.
The solo exhibition “Swim” was held at The Obuse Museum (The Nakajima Chinami Gallery), Nagano in 2011. In the next year, she joined “New Art Exhibition NEXT vol.1 Sparkling Days” at Yokohama Civic Art Gallery and showed her new installation “Ringing Light” visualizing the sounds to which she can listen when she feels light. She developed her expression of “light” on not only flat form like paintings but also such installations handling spaces.

Along with the said solo exhibition at Art Tower Mito, she got Yokohama Cultural Award and Kanagawa Cultural Award, the year of 2013 became a successful for her. Especially, in the solo exhibition at Art Tower Mito showing both representative and new works together, her first try of video installation “sora” was also exhibited and got high reputation.
In a space measuring 11 meters high by 9 meters square, she projected the colorful animation of flowers, woods, grasses and lights to spherical mirrors floating in the air, and reflected it to the whole of the exhibition room. It made the people feel like swimming in the forest with various colors and forms. Soya says that when she thinks to create something, “creation forest” emerges in herself and it grows rapidly. Such her “creative energy” was visualized in this installation.
In this solo exhibition, we will exhibit the original drawings for this installation mainly which were not shown at Art Tower Mito.
“As I drew, the plants that appeared started going along on their own. The ways they moved and the colors they required transcended what I had imagined. I was pulled along by them and the forest took shape”. As Soya talks in the art book, these drawings are filled with her fresh and amazing inspiration in the process of the visualization of “creative energy”.

Courtesy of Nishimura Gallery