Arario Gallery Seoul introduces Aono Fumiaki (b. 1968)’s first solo exhibition in Korea. Aono Fumiaki has been collecting and restoring objects that are discarded in various places over the past 20 years. This exhibition will focus on works that are made of objects gathered from Sendai, one of the places that suffered most heavily during the 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake and Tsunami. Confronted with the shock of everything ordinary being annihilated in one instant, the artist restores life through the process of “reincarnation,” regenerating the traces left in ruins and highlighting the meaning found in the destroyed. Ordinary objects from the daily life routine have disappeared, but their vestiges are combined with new objects, and become an eternal holder of memory in the form of art, retaining the meanings they carried before their destruction. The etymology of the word “reincarnation,” used in the title, can be traced back to the Latin term Carneus, which means flesh or meat. This concept, in Aono Fumiaki’s works, can be understood as the act of breathing life back into discarded objects by adding flesh to debris. Unlike the general notion of “recreation” in art, the artist’s works on “reincarnation” rests on restoring discarded and broken objects that ceaselessly surround us in our lives. This exhibition is the opportunity for the Korean viewers to explore the works of Aono Fumiaki, who was selected as the most significant artist at Aichi Triennale in 2013. The artist introduces us to yet another gaze from Japanese contemporary art in the form of “healing art and life,” showing how the traces of pain left behind the great earthquake and the Tsunami could be restored as embodied presence as well as meaning.

Exhibition Objective Aono Fumiaki focuses more on the concept of “fixing” rather than “making,” as generally defined with works of art. For the artist, “fixing” goes beyond simple restoration of the past; it is a recovery and rebirth, oriented towards the future. Discarded or broken objects are reincarnated into works of art through the artist’s imagination, which reaches beyond mere formal regeneration and becomes a recovery of meaning and healing of life. In our age of materialism, when not only works of art but almost everything around us is mass-produced, consumed and quickly discarded, Aono Fumiaki presents a new perspective on art through his artistic “reincarnations.”

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery