NEW CITY ART FAIR 2015

92art Studio to present artist Kunihiko YAZAWA at NEW CITY ART FAIR - Art Fair Showcasing Japanese Contemporary Art during Armory Arts Week, New York

 

Over the past 20 years YAZAWA has developed a dynamic and multifaceted art practice. His practice which takes art as the act of living itself, encompasses not only object-making but a diverse range of activities which seek to reimagine the artist’s role in society, through engaging with publics and contexts that at first appear disconnected from the art world through his art, and by reconstructing the artist-audience relationship. Many industry leaders and researchers have been influenced by YAZAWA’s work and his fan-base continues to grow.
 
For the fair we are thrilled to present his latest two-dimensional body of work from the Lines and Shapes Series and Verbs - Works in Ink Series. The Lines and Shapes Series in which YAZAWA works solely in the medium of cloth and thread, is both an exploration into new possibilities of expression as well as an exploration of YAZAWA’s distinctive imagined universe. We will be showing YAZAWA’s monochrome pieces from this series.
 
The Verbs - Works in Ink Series captures the distinctive world of Japanese verbs - 「あう」(to meet), 「はじめる」(to start),「わらう」 (to laugh),「めでる」 (to adore), 「いずる」 (to leave). Verbs express human activity. The Japanese language has absorbed many different linguistic influences reflected in gairaigo (foreign origin words) and Chinese characters, but it still retains a corpus of Yamato-kotoba - an indigenous language, including verbs which express a peculiarly Japanese way of life and spirit. His fascination with these words has led YAZAWA to create over 520 works. Some evoke prayers, others seem to throb with energy and leap out at the viewer. For this fair we will present a selection of works from this series.