Dedicated to Ryoki Kurasaki & Kurumi Kotani Duo Exhibition "there-was"

This is the full text for the collection book of Ryoki Kurasaki & Kurumi Kotani Duo Exhibition "there-was" which I curated and  was held from November 20 to December 20, 2020.   
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Ryoki Kurasaki & Kurumi Kotani Duo Exhibition“ there-was”
2020. 11. 21 Sat. - 2020. 12. 20 Sun.
https://dmoarts.com/en_exhibition/2020/there-was/

The exhibition focuses on two young fine artists.
The exhibition focuses on two young fine artists.
They are contemporaries and share a common theme of "traces" and, by extension, the "reverence for that which is beyond human control," it suggests.
The paintings themselves can be considered as "traces" of the materials placed on their supports. It is the intellect, such as imagination and knowledge, that gives meaning to the mere traces. Recognizing what is depicted in the painting and deciphering more than what is depicted in the painting is a uniquely human activity, and this pursuit is the essence of art.
On the other hand, the two artists are in stark contrast.
This exhibition aims to show the contrast in individuality that is made clear by the juxtaposition of the two artists, despite the harmony of their common method of expression, which does not directly present the subject matter, but uses "traces" to indicate their theme.
In this note, the two artists’ backgrounds will be introduced according to their interviews*1 first, and then the differences in their respective expressions will be mentioned.

Ryoki Kurasaki

Ryoki Kurasaki was born in Fukuoka, 1995 and graduated Kyushu Designer Gakuin in 2016.
He learned illustration and design at a vocational school and then went out into the world as an illustrator, which suggests that his career started as just a job choice. On the other hand, the fact that he mainly used oil painting, which is not a popular material for commercial illustrations, shows that Kurasaki has a strong connection to fine art, especially painting.
A turning point for Kurasaki, a kind of "mundane" painter, creating oil painting in an illustrative style in his earliest career, was seeing the exhibition " SUNSHOWER：Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now," held at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum*2, from November to December 2017.
This exhibition, in which 86 artists from 10 ASEAN countries were selected, the history of colonization and the issues of national and civic identity were strongly reflected, shocked Kurasaki, who had been torn between illustration and artistic expression, made him change the way he thought and looked at art, and decide to try his own experimental Expressions.
In September of the same year, when Kurasaki had just turned 22 years old, he presented some paintings with flowers and people in UNKNOWN ASIA Art Exchange Osaka 2017. Although the power of the picture was acclaimed*3, it did not win any major awards. However, at the preliminary portfolio review held in Fukuoka for the following year, 2018, he presented an entirely different painting approach, in which he burned the finished paintings. On that occasion, he was offered a solo exhibition in 2019 at DMOARTS, which hosted the review.

If one phrase is permitted to describe the theme that has emerged as an expression of Kurasaki's unique identity, values, and aesthetic sense, it would be a "view of life and death."
This is based on some experiences of his youth. Before Kurasaki was born, his cousin died shortly after his birth. Kurasaki's mother wished for the baby to come back to them again, and then she became pregnant. The family was so pleased with the birth that they named him Ryoki, after the one character in his cousin's name, and always said, "Ryoki is the reincarnation of his cousin." This episode shows how Kurasaki, as a child, understood that human life is not something we take for granted, and people's memory remains even after death.
　On the other hand, when he witnessed two suicides, one in his high school age and the other was in junior, he was shocked by the crowd making a fuss and jokes, taking pictures around. These events stood in strong contrast to his family members who were mourning the death and rejoicing in the birth. The "lightness" of the anonymous people's view of life and death left a poignant impression.

The "Blindness" series that with burned eyes, literally shows how people ignore death. The burn marks left behind, as if the eyes had been hollowed out, against the blurred, sepia-colored figures, are graphic and shocking to viewers. This, in itself, expresses the grotesque disregard for death, as if it is fire on the opposite shore. In the "Traces Of The Soul" series with blocked two parts, the soot left by the flames in the blank space on the screen represents "traces of the soul." The fire does indeed symbolize the soul that was there and the sense of mourning, and it has a stronger connotation of purification than in Blindness.
Above all, Kurasaki's entire body of work is imbued with a fundamental common sense of beauty- sacredness, decadence, and aesthetics - culminating in the new series. This group of works titled "melt" at the first release in September 2020 looks just a framed painting, but as the title suggests, part of it, from the frame to the screen, is strangely "melted." the works made of wax, modeled from old paintings, is like burning a candle of life, lit by the fire and transformed by the heat it produces.
　While his method of likening life to fire is intact, "the fascination of the destroyed," which has an undeniable strength at times, conveys Kurasaki's aesthetics.

Kurumi Kotani

Kurumi Kotani was born in Osaka, 1994 and graduated from former Kyoto University of Art and Design (Kyoto University of Art and Design) graduate school in 2019.
She was a wild child as a Boy Scouts member, playing in nature, learning how to use difficult-to-handle tools, and building several kinds of things with materials from the mountain.
As field activity, sometimes the Scouts stayed for a night in the woods beyond a park. Getting soaked in the rain while sleeping and felt fear walking out in the dark at night, she spontaneously developed a reverence for nature and an interest in invisible concepts – the occult. When the Scouts climb a mountain, the members learned how to leave signs for subsequent troops. They use only what was in their environment to convey information and read meaning from how people had tampered with nature.
These experiences in this environment are essential in understanding how Kotani perceived the world and shaped her artistry.
Because of the breadth of her interests, she had experimented with various techniques such as sculpture; however, she decided to focus on painting, wanting to learn a single thing more profoundly.
Some concepts are unsuitable for painting expression in today's world of diverse methods of expression. What is the meaning of painting in this ara when photography is so widely used? She started to think like that, and her output became more clarify.

A common concept in the works Kotani has created has been depicting 'traces,' and in 2018, she presented two series of works in the first year of MFA, '21g' and 'Rust.'
'21g' series follows the traditional Western art method in defining the painting as a window, although the focus is not on the view beyond the window but instead on the glass inorganically fitted in front of it. The viewer intuitively senses that "someone was here right before" by the finger marks left on the condensation.
Here is a bit of description here of Kotani's statement that she takes her cues from the occult. Kotani defines the occult as a "bug in the human brain." From prehistoric times until the modern age of science, people have perceived (or believed to have perceived) things that should not have existed. Like a vaguely depicted landscape behind condensation, people compensate for this vagueness with their imagination and perceive it as "real" –a distortion. This is what Kotani is interested in.
In taking on the occult, Kotani chose to make a "horror movies" that full of metaphor, with an extraordinarily detailed screen in visual expression. The presence of someone, expressed only through the condensation of the window, and its visual beauty. "21g" was created from these essences.
Even in the tense mood, the innocent and sometimes funny finger marks, such as ai-ai-gasa (kid's romantic spell) and the smiley face, are typical proof of Kotani's humor, and it is showing the major theme of the work is not "scary" itself of horror movies.

In comparison, it is the series called "Rust" that took a relatively long time to polish as a work of art. This is because it is an ambitious work that attempts to address a larger idea, in addition to using rust, a naturally occurring material. Although the theme can be described the same as traces, it attempts to express the concept of the "Anthropocene," which is still being debated today, "traces left by humans on the earth." Anthropocene is the new idea to study humankind's impact on the Earth - there are many theories as to the starting point for agriculture, industry, and nuclear power - as a geological age. The atmospheric chemist Paul Krutzen proposed this idea in 2000*4, and it has become widely known since then.
In this series, iron, one of the oldest metals used by humans, is subjected to the natural effects of rust. The work speaks to modern people who think of humankind and nature as separate entities, that themselves are part of a larger entity called the Earth, and points out the truth that the effects of humankind's legacy are indeed geologically embedded in it. When confronted with the actual work, iron and rust's heavy materiality is compelling enough to support the artist's ambition.
A variety of motifs are expected to be developed in this series, but the ones depicting artificial flowers are the most eye-catching. We hope the viewers will enjoy this work as searching for a sense of discomfort that exists despite the fact that the flowers are human models of nature but look like the real thing in the painting.

References

*1 DMOARTS website, Ryoki Kurasaki Interview “Traces Of The Soul” / Kurumi Kotani Interview “Themes and background of her artwork”
*2 UNKNOWN ASIA Art Exchange Osaka 2017, Yoshihiro Taniguchi Entire Artists Review
*3 SUNSHOWER：Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Gallery talk report
*4 Paul Jozef Crutzen / Eugene Stoermer ”The Anthropocene,” The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme 41st newsletter in 2000

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Collection book ”Royoki kurasaki / Kurumi Kotani”
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