NANZUKA is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of new works by Akiyoshi Mishima.
Mishima was born in Osaka in 1978, and after graduating from graphic design school took part in the Enlightenment led by Hiro Sugiyama. Since 2009, he has been highly active in a wide range of activity beyond his own creative body of work, including art direction for the fashion brand FUGAHUM, the collaborative performance unit MECABIOtH with Koji Nakamura, performances for Tomoyasu Hotei’s London concerts, and VJ-ing for notable musicians Towa Tei and Shinichi Osawa. As a contemporary artist, he has shown solo exhibitions at the likes of Germany’s influential gallery Nagel Draxler in Berlin, and his reputation grows larger each year.
Mishima has previously been featured in three solo exhibitions at NANZUKA with QUARTER (2006), FAMILY (2009), and Hierarchy (2011), exhibiting works based on an anthropological approach to the thematic universality of the renewal of intellect, sensation, and energy that occurs over generations. In 2012, for his solo exhibition AWAKENING HYPNOSIS held at Galerie Lena Brüning in Berlin, he exhibited a series of works depicting the primordial form of energy that drives mankind forward, collectively titled “Indigo Children” in reference to the new generation of children, in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, reflecting his own creative activity upon the issues we have faced since 3/11. Two solo exhibitions, Shōgon (Christian Nagel Cologne Project space) and Sassuru (Galerie Nagel Draxler, 2014), that took place in Germany in April of 2013 and January of 2014, displayed a new directionality in his work, presenting flat works in pursuit of an aesthetic universality, drawing from both mainstays of Japanese history such as lacquerware and the works of artist Tawaraya Sōtatsu as well as from German modern art, including such artists as Paul Klee and Kandinsky.
The upcoming solo exhibition, held three years since his last showing at this gallery, is inspired by the concept of the “knothole” featuring an installation of two- and three- dimensional pieces composed together with microscopes, and is based on the notion of “a broad perspective which can be reached for the first time after pursuing a viewpoint in exhaustive detail.”
Of the upcoming exhibition, Mishima comments:
“For instance, in the same way that scientists and physicists learn how the world works through observing nature, we can still learn many things from perspectives hidden within our daily lives. We, the Japanese people, have since ancient times built upon the concept of multitudinous gods that exist within the natural climate and living environment everywhere, yet that idea contains simultaneously both the perspective of gods being within each and every worldly thing, as well as the interpretation that the world is made up from that collective entity. In this exhibition, in my own way, I am attempting to represent that manner of perception.”
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and NANZUKA
