NYAB Event - Masato Yamaguchi “MADE IN TOKYO”

Masato Yamaguchi “MADE IN TOKYO”

Gallery Onetwentyeight

This event has ended.

onetwentyeight presents the solo show by Masato Yamaguchi - MADE IN TOKYO on March 3, 2016.

It is not accidental that the first solo show in New York for Masato Yamaguchi, a young artist from Tokyo, happens to be hosted by onetwentyeight, the Lower East Side gallery on 128 Rivington street. The gallery is run by the artist Kazuko Miyamoto for 30 years, supporting emerging artists who are seeking to challenge their fate in New York.

The artist is particularly interested in showing his works in New York as they are directly related to American art, and New York art.

The works by Masato Yamaguchi can be classified as remakes. They are traditional Japanese craft making and well known recognizable patterns and logos of the works by Yayoi Kusama, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and Donald Judd, including such symbols as Mickey Mouse, the Skull, and the Dollar.

Repetitive, recognizable persistence like “Micky’s persistence springs from something unhyped, something timeless in the image that allows it to pass in status from a fad to an icon” - John Updike on Mickey Mouse.

In 1919 Duchamp drew a mustache and beard on the reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He was not the first one to change the well known painting. Just adding new details completely changed the perception of the work that will never be the same again, it will always have several interpretations, both original, that is still a mystery and the newly acquired.

Much later Rauschenberg erased the drawing by De Kooning, going even further in denying, protesting against accepted. Andy Warhol reinvented the images of popular faces transforming them into words; fragility, uncertainty, powerlessness contrasted to the reassuring bright colors.
MADE IN TOKYO, is not a denial, not even a protest, not redefining.
On the contrary, it demonstrates pleasure and comfort. Colors, medium used, sizes of the works are just burst of pleasing effect. “We know it!”: that is what you think when see the works. “I like it. It is perfect, it is positive, it is victorious.”

“My roots lie in 1990s Tokyo”, the artist writes about himself. “The subculture known as “Shibuya-kei”, which produced musicians such as Flipper’s Guitar, Puzzicato Five and Towa Tei, and graphic designers like Contemporary Production and Goovisions, were incorporation influences from America, England, France. These artists took foreign styles and trends and reproduced them with a polished superficiality, with an emphasis on technical mastery and catchiness rather then pure originality.”