Artists:ISHIKAWA Ryuichi × MORI Nana
Curation:OKURA Yusuke
2022, October 26th – December 9th
This exhibition, featuring work by Ishikawa Ryuichi and Mori Nana, explores contemporary sansui painting. This will be their second collaboration, following the exhibition A Grand Moment (絶景の瞬間), held at The 5th Floor in Tokyo, 2021.
The term sansui, which uses a combination of the characters for ‘mountain’ (山） and ‘water’ （水）to express a conception of the natural sometimes translated as ‘landscape’, has developed various meanings and manifestations in different contexts. This aesthetic, which has been passed down in an unbroken tradition from ancient China, is linked with diverse cultural sources, giving rise to East Asian arts including sansui poetry (山水詩) and sansui ink painting (水墨山水画).
We believe that this sensitivity that perceives something fundamental hidden deep within sansui’s expression of nature is a legacy that those of us living in the present have inherited.
This exhibition explores the sansui sensibility that occurs in contemporary works by Mori and Ishikawa in Kurenboh’s meditation hall. The works on display are the product of their experience, confronting head-on our inherently existential questions about life and death. In addition to the series presented on separate occasions in recent years, this exhibition will also feature a specially produced collaborative work, ‘Mori Ishikawa Sansui Picture’.
Taking the differing modes of expression constituted by photography and calligraphy as its departure, this exhibition brings these two bodies of contemporaneous work together in the same space with the aim of creating an opportunity for experiencing the evolving tradition of sansui, and encouraging further reflection on the connection between humans and nature.
Kurenboh