KAYOKOYUKI

SLASH is a series of two-person exhibitions each as a collaborative project rather than mere juxtaposition of works by the two artists featured. Each exhibition begins with consecutive meetings to develop mutual understandings, learning each other’s vision and awareness. Discussing what kind of proposition to make toward society with their work, and going through all the possibilities, they would little by little build up their plan for the exhibition.
Even the invitation card is designed as a collaborative artwork. In relation to the artist's common interests, several key words are picked up and transformed into an abstract concept to which the art director CRAFTIVE would elaborately gives form with reasonable materials and methodologies.
I believe it is quite important to exchange ideas with others and take the initiative to create new values together, not following given directions set by certain powerful artists or curators, nor leaving it up to the trend of the times. Rather than trusting individual self-absorbed thinking, nor being worried about winning or losing, we just have to believe in the prolific imagination arising at the intersection of different ideas.

*SLASH derives from a type of fan fiction with the same name that focuses on a paring of two characters. The name arises from the use of the slash symbol (/) to separate the two names in those stories, instead of using of the ampersand (&) conventionally.

The forms of artworks have been increasingly diversified, with various materials and through different methods, and the viewer has been used to viewing artworks in different forms accordingly, especially in recent years in which a variety of options to compose images have been available. The two artists presented in this exhibition, however, have worked consistently on supposedly traditional methods developed in the long history of art: namely, stone sculpture and oil painting. Sculpting stones with a gouge and a hammer, or painting on a canvas with oil paints and brushes, is borrowed from those who invented the technique somewhere a long time ago. What would it mean, then, to be aware of such a trajectory and still determine to confront it in order to express oneself, as an artist dealing with the world today?
To start each work, Ayako Ohno first draws an overhead view of the given space. Based on it, she then elaborates arrangement of sculptural objects in accordance with the spatiality. The sculptures are made of stone, a material that contains history of events and layers of time in itself (An ammonite sometimes appears while she sculpts it). On her artistic practice, Ohno says, "It's not logical at all. I choose my material and method just to get close to the original image that has propelled me." Definitely influenced by Western painting, yet re-examining it from his own perspective, Daichi Takagi's paintings are experiments on forms and their arrangement within a limited field of the canvas, exploring yet-undiscovered potentials of painting. The two artists' works might seem inhuman, as their forms and shapes have no obvious clues to let us reach their motifs or sources. However, tracking the minute traces of their actions that the works carry, we will perceive contemporary artistic sensibility abstracted through the filter called body.
The exhibition title, "Gimme something sweet that is everlasting," is related to what an artwork shows us when we spend certain amount of time to view it, instead of considering it only in terms of methodology, and how such a discovery would last long as an experience of our own.