Enrico Isamu Oyama “Rock Show, Sick I Go”

The Gallery (at o.d.o.)

This event has ended.

THE GALLERY presents Rock Show, Sick I Go, an exhibition of multimedia works by Enrico Isamu Oyama. Oyama, who is based in New York City and Tokyo, has been creating visual art influenced by street aerosol writing of the 1970’s to 80’s in New York and beyond.

He has been presenting his iconic motif known as Quick Turn Structure (QTS) across the borders of various mediums, and worked actively on collaborative projects such as COMME des GARÇONS for their Spring / Summer 2012 collection and Yokozuna Terunofuji’s Kesho Mawashi (large decorative apron for Sumo wrestler) at the New Year Grand Sumo Tournament in January 2022. This exhibition at THE GALLERY would be his latest one with the team led by the owner and chef, Hiroki Odo.

Oyama’s new works include a mural on outdoor dinning tent and a wall installation of “wild posting”, a method of commercial street advertising commonly seen on the street walls in NYC. “Together with street aerosol writing, they often generate a complex and layered visual tapestry in an urban landscape” says Oyama.

Enrico Isamu Oyama (b. 1983, Italian / Japanese) creates visual art in various mediums that features Quick Turn Structure; the motif composed of spontaneous repetition and expansion of free-flowing lines informed by aerosol writing of 1970’s-80’s New York and beyond.

Oyama was born in Tokyo to an Italian father of Bavarian descent and a Japanese mother. While growing up there, the family had visited Veneto region in North Italy every summer for more than 2 decades. Going back and forth experiencing Tokyo as megalopolis and North Italy as quiet countryside trained him to view the world from different angles.

Oyama became interested in aerosol writing around the time he lived in Veneto in 2000-01. After returning to Tokyo, he started drawing a line pattern in black and white with three-dimensional depth. Oyama established it as his style in Tokyo underground art scene through early to mid 2000’s.

About the exhibition : Artist Statement
JAPANESE STATEMENT
１　Outdoor Dining and Wild Posting

There were two preconditions to plan this exhibit. Firstly, the venue, THE GALLERY, has a concept of combining art gallery and dining place as an equal component. Secondly, the exhibit takes place in the post-pandemic New York City. It is my first solo presentation in the city after being away for two years in Tokyo.

Based on these, the first keyword that came to my mind was “outdoor dining.” While the restaurant industry had a difficult time through the pandemic, they created a form of dining outside, which became a new element of street scenery that adorns the everyday life of New Yorker.

Thinking about street scenery, next keyword I got was “wild posting.” These posters pasted on street walls as commercial advertisement are often seen in Western cities. While seemingly unsanctioned, they actually blur the border of legal and illegal, art and advertisement, and have inspired artists like Mimmo Rotella.

Such street activities like outdoor dining and wild posting, the former appeared amidst the pandemic and the latter predating it, along with street art, which has always been my artistic subject, weave up a complex visual tapestry and update the urban landscape of ever-changing New York City. Based on these ideas, I composed the exhibit as following.

２　The Exhibit

Visitors first see a work of mural FFIGURATI #404 as well as the wild posting created for this exhibit, both installed on the tent of outdoor dinning. While the posters are also spread over different areas of the city for promotional purpose, they are also displayed on the interior wall of THE GALLERY, being an advertisement and a content of the exhibit at the same time.
There is another wall piece FFIGURATI #400 installed on the glass wall at the entrance, whose Quick Turn Structure* also appears in the wild posting. The outdoor dining tent, the wild posting and the two wall pieces around the entrance recreate the visual tapestry of the urban landscape, which characterizes this exhibit the most.

Inside THE GALLERY, there are walls with pasted wild posting as well as various new and recent paintings and prints. One of them is FFIGURATI #403, a newly created small piece for this exhibit. The same QTS from FFIGURATI #400 is stenciled with aerosol paint in this piece.

The same QTS repeatedly appears through FFIGURATI #400, FFIGURATI #403, the wild posting, and even the cover of the original zine that serves both as the dining menu of THE GALLERY and the document of the exhibit. In this way, the QTS bridges various dimensions across in and outdoor that consist of this exhibit such as walls, canvases, tents, advertisements, dinning menu and documents.

３　Raku-sho and Seki-ga

While these are references to the street landscape of post pandemic New York City, this exhibit layers further differentiate time and space over it; Raku-sho and Seki-ga in early modern Japan. This is a natural reaction to the venue, THE GALLERY, run by Japanese chef Hiroki Odo, as well as a thought experiment to seek phenomena that link with the ideas of this exhibit in flourish urban culture of Edo, the former Tokyo.

Raku-sho, a satire that criticizes the authority of the time, often written or drawn on paper and dropped on the streets, is one of the precedents of street anonymous expressions in Japan. The criticism towards authority is also a characteristic of today’s street art such as Banksy, whose works sometime resemble Raku-sho. While the use of paper medium is common in Raku-sho and wild posting, the purposes of each practice, authority criticism and commercial advertisement, is much different.

Seki-ga is impromptu painting performance that was done in front of guests at drinking parties in Edo period. It is a form of art expression associated with the venue of dinning, which echoes the concept of this exhibit. As an artist who used to do live painting performance often, Seki-ga has always been subject of my interest.

With no academic evidence, I somewhat sense a resonance in spirit among Raku-sho and Seki-ga, which had affinity with townspeople culture of Edo, and the contemporary street aesthetics. By juxtaposing diverse contexts of different time and space, such as New York City and Edo, present day and early modern, we aim to let the visitor’s imagination jump beyond borders. It is a sort of playfulness, and also an attitude of street itself.

The playfulness is best expressed in the title “Rock Show, Sick I Go,” a pun on Raku-sho and Seki-ga with no concrete meaning. At the same time, the phrase has a certain American or street-like tone. It is a modest statement on the historical fact that superficial acceptance or misinterpretation of culture often give a birth to new stream of creation.

４　The Street

Lastly, we notice something by knowing the history. Children used to scribble on the streets in New York City. However, the era of automobile came. In the 1950’s, urban planner Robert Moses did the widening construction of 453 streets in Manhattan and the scribbles have disappeared. Do the streets belong to cars, or humans? Back then, Moses and Jane Jacobs had intense argument about the way the city streets should be.The tents of outdoor dining stand on the car lanes right next to sidewalks. Some of these car lanes may have once been sidewalks filled with children’s scribbles. They are now again place for humans to enjoy food and drinks. The outdoor dining brings the streets, which have been taken away by urban planning, back to the hand of humans, as if the vibrancy that Jacobs loved revives over the time.
I have once discussed that what used to be the children’s street scribbles came back with a new form as the street art in 1970’s that used the subway cars as canvas. When knowing such layers of the city, converting the tent of outdoor dining into canvas also recalls the deep memory of the city that goes beyond the time frame of the pandemic. This is one of the things that make me feel the cultural value of holding this exhibit in New York City.

* Oyama’s signature black-and-white motif that appears across his works. It is composed of spontaneous repetition and expansion of free-flowing lines informed by street aerosol writing of 1970’s-80’s New York and beyond.
Special Thanks to

Ayako Bando / Nicholas Brown / GION / Go Kasai / Jane Lombard Gallery / Nakagawa Chemical Inc. / Sauced Lab / Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

The Gallery Crew

Manabu Asanuma / Ricard Diaz / Victor Diaz / Shuji Furukawa / Karma Gurung / Maia Basaing / Fabian Morales / Hiroki Odo / Miki Ozawa / Sefa Özdoğan / Brian Saito / Victor Sandoval / Mari Yoh

Exhibition curated by Akiko Ichikawa