NYAB Event - Takahiro Iwasaki “In Focus”

Takahiro Iwasaki “In Focus”

Asia Society and Museum

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Asia Society Museum presents Takahiro Iwasaki: In Focus, the Japanese artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition comprises a newly commissioned work by Iwasaki (b. 1975; Hiroshima, Japan), known for creating detailed miniature landscapes using found and recycled materials. The transformation of these objects from trash into sublime sculptures underscores the artist’s belief in the “duality of chaos and order imprinted on everyday life.”
For this exhibition, the artist selected as his inspiration a pair of seventeenth-century Japanese folding screens from the Asia Society Museum Collection, titled Flowers and Grasses of the Four Seasons.

His newly created work will be shown alongside the six-panel screens which are part of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection. Of the Edo period works, Iwasaki has said:
“The screens feature nameless field grasses depicted with such grace, elegance, and care that [they] honor even these most mundane of plants. Just as the artist of the screens did, I would like to revisit a commonplace everyday scene from today’s Japan, and just as the screens embody a smooth flow from one season to the next, I hope to capture, in my work, the graceful transition of a Japanese landscape from the past to the present.”
Iwasaki has created a delicate and fanciful landscape made of fibers from recycled Japanese kimonos. His work—inspired by traditional Japanese landscape painting—is displayed in six Plexiglas boxes set at angles similar in form to the original folded screens.

Takahiro Iwaskai was born in 1975 in Hiroshima, Japan, and lives and works in Hiroshima. He received a PhD from Hiroshima City University in 2003 and an MFA from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2005. Since then, Iwasaki has been the focus of select solo and group exhibitions internationally.
The exhibition is part of Asia Society Museum’s ongoing In Focus series in which contemporary artists create new works of art, often inspired by works of their choice from the Asia Society Museum Collection. The exhibition is curated by Michelle Yun, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Artists participating in recent In Focus exhibitions at Asia Society include Shiva Ahmadi, U-Ram Choe, Michael Joo, Yoshihiro Suda, and Yuken Teruya.

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