Gene Gallery is honored to announce that it will exhibit "MONO", a two-solo exhibition of Japanese artists Hamada Kiyoshi and Isao Sugiyama, on July 20. It is also the first time that the works of Mono-Ha artist Hamada Kiyoshi have appeared in China.
“Newer is better”? The Japanese post-war art group -- “Mono-ha” asking people for a pause and reconsider the dominant consumerism society.
In the 1960s, a group of Japanese artists from Tokyo started to re-consider the meaning of things, acutely rejected the western ideologies by criticizing commercial capitalism and modern progressivism.
Hamada Kiyoshi, born in 1937, thinks that the painted area and the negative space are equally important, reaching a state of equilibrium. For more than 50 years, Hamada has always been committed to abstract painting. Through oil painting, wood carving, and paper-printing, Hamada’s extremely time-consuming and repetitive work creates a pattern of infinity.in his words, the infinite world needs endless exploration. In this infinite world, the process of creating art is “INORI (Pray).”
Isao Sugiyama, born in 1954, his sculptures express his sacred belief to nature and spirit. When studying in Europe in his early age, the collision between two drastically different cultures inspired him. The combination of wood and marble forming the “the cabin of god” is an inaccessible cliff from the earth. The slow weathering of marble and the rapid decay of wood harmonize into tranquil introspective reclusion. The ripple on the marble’s surface reflects the artistic conception of the dry landscape in the Japanese classical garden system.
The two artists came from “Mono-ha” bring new perspectives on the discussion of the “original state” of nature by rethinking about the relationship between individual. As Hamada says: “this doesn’t mean there is nothing, it just means there is no conclusion in artmaking.”