NYAB Event - Mumu Funaki Exhibition

Mumu Funaki Exhibition

Ouchi Gallery

This event has ended.

FUNAKI Mumu's works are casually claimed by the artist himself as "painting" although that explanation sounds to me insufficient somehow. His works consequentially look like paintings although the process, as much as I see, is not exactly meant to make paintings. He explains his works as, "imagine there's a cup and nothing in it, but the 'nothing' grows gradually and it fills the cup. And when it spills out, what spilt has to be something...and my works are that something." When he does a live painting show, which takes an important part of his activity, he puts an about 1m x 4m size roll sheet of paper on the floor and he paints it sitting on it, he does not even look at the whole view of the picture, he may often seem as he is just playing around with drawing inks, pouring, smudging and scrubbing, with some plants (from the flower shop nearby) used as "brushes". The choice of those plants depends on whether Funaki likes it or not by its look, not caring its physical performance. Perhaps, he is just playing around literally, with his all sensitivity and energy possible. As the performance goes on, in the midst of spilled paints and scattered pieces of plants on the paper, a viewer may find that the purpose of making a tableau has been absent. There, the painter, the paints, and the painting are one. In his works, he is not trying to show his ability of making tableau. He may be trying to find a state of mind, something close to purity or innocence as he "performs painting". So to be more precise, his purpose is going there at the state, and his paintings are the footprints on the way getting there. Or, another way to say, they may be the clues to guess what is inside the cup.
---Hideaki Hayashitani, painter