INSTINC presents an exhibition titled Zone Eclipse by Tokyo based artists Chihiro Kabata & Yuuri Kabata. With new bodies of paintings created during their one month in Singapore at INSTINC’s Artist-in- residence programme.

For Chihiro's works, she will be creating drawings made with black and coloured pens she brought from Japan. The works will be abstract on Epson glossy paper. For her, when something cannot be seen - that is when the imagination is stimulated the most. Not showing something - that is one way of creating an impression of an existence that is stronger than when it can be seen.

When trying to create an artwork through the negative act of not showing, you need to create a suitable "doorway" by which the viewer's imagination can be stimulated. She chooses painting to be that "doorway." She thinks the most suitable paintings for that task are abstract paintings, because they demand a lot of the viewer's imagination. She makes many tens of thousands of lines in the paintings, and yet she never actually depict anything. You could say that the lines she makes are horizons, borders between the visible and the invisible. As such they are absolute, and cannot be crossed by her or the viewer.

During her time in Singapore, Kabata Yuuri created a series of black and white paintings that were developed by assigning rules to each painting. In each work fixed rules are assigned, and they are painted following those rules. When painting tied to these laws, the non-fixed surface of the painting is a solitary job, and the act of production itself creates the work as a result. In the same way that there are limitless possibilities for complication in the repetition of simple expressions, the world that we know has acquired complexity in its repetitive formative processes.

-INSTINC

Image: © Yurri Kabata
Simulacra (detailed)
2011
Oil on aluminum panel
100 x 100cm