NYAB Event - Ken Hamazaki “Grateful Red”

Ken Hamazaki “Grateful Red”

This event has ended.
At Gallery KUMUKUMU
Media: Painting, Drawing, Performance Art

KUMUKUMU presents Japanese artist Ken Hamazaki’s solo exhibition debut in the United States, “Grateful Red.” Hamazaki appropriates the iconography of the Grateful Dead in eighteen new works, rendering the band’s trademark figures in monochrome, with the intricate maze-style drawing that has been central to his practice thus far, as well as stencil, reflecting his recent interest in street art.

Hamazaki believes that the interconnected “global village” that 20th-Century media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously foresaw has come to fruition in the form of a global marketplace. While the Internet facilitates rapid communication, it does so largely in the service of commerce, rendering personal, meaningful interaction (with both people and objects) increasingly rare. In response to this alienation and diminished intimacy, Hamazaki produces works that require direct, unmediated engagement. Digital images of his monochrome works, painted red-on-red, suggest little more than untouched monochrome canvases, thereby negating the potential for them to be endlessly reproduced, disseminated, and commodified. Only up close, in person, do the tonal images appear.

Many of the works show Hamazaki kneeling beneath an umbrella, referencing the Red Tea Ceremony he performed at the opening and which he regularly performs around the world. In some works, he replicates this depiction using a stencil on canvas, while in others he meticulously creates the same image using a ballpoint pen and acrylic. The Grateful Dead’s bear, crow, and terrapin each take a turn communing with him. In a single work, however, the space across from the artist is left blank, an invitation to the viewer for shared experience and understanding.

Over the past twenty years, Ken Hamazaki’s work has been shown in museums and galleries internationally, including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. He has performed his Red Tea Ceremony in nearly one hundred locations over the last decade. With his iconic shaved head, red body paint, and red costumes, he has become known as “The Red Man.”