Subjective Surreality

Hiroaki Konaka

Tatsuya Matsushita

Taishi Shingu

Takura Suzuki

Each of the four artists in this exhibition approach reality—and therefore also surreality—in vastly different ways. This radical subjectivity is what makes the show come alive. Hiroaki Konaka’s gauzy, lyrical paintings reflect his interest in memory and the personal. Takura Suzuki’s piece in the show, a dominating presence by virtue of its size, plays with references and ideas around the internet and smartphones. Tatsuya Matsushita’s work, with its echoes of the human body, is literally visceral. Taishi Shingu’s graphic and colorful manga references serialize experience into an impressionistic narrative. Each of them distorts and subverts reality in their own manner.

The original Surrealists were concerned with unlocking the secrets of the unconscious mind. By plumbing the depths of their psyches, they were able to vividly turn themselves inside out. We see a similar urge in the work in Subjective Surreality, though with such an array of aesthetic approaches it might be hard to recognize at first. Still, all four artists in this show have shown us what keeps them up at night, what most concerns them, and the secret content of their minds.

Hiroaki Konaka draws on his childhood experiences of nature and the lighting of digital screens to portray the realities of the modern world. He incorporates painting and photographic/monitoring features he learned as a student, and works with foil, pearls, dyes, and other materials that influence space-time, people, and the environment to create works that are in a constant state of flux. His artwork fuses images, photographs, and paintings, an approach that generates and resuscitates images based on an animistic perspective on nature, the idea that all things have a soul.

Tatsuya Matsushita creates paintings, collages, and objects that address the theme of visual tactility in Japanese art. One of the common characteristics of Japanese modern and post-modern art is an overabundance of visual tactility (the sense of touch perceived through the sense of the sight). According to Matsushita, this is a characteristic of Japanese art that is almost forgotten today. By focusing on excessive tactile sensation once again as a new approach to traditional Japanese art, he devises a unique new expression.

Taishi Shingu was born in the countryside of Okuizumo in Shimane Prefecture, Japan, a place where folklore has been handed down from generation to generation. As a child, he became obsessed with comics and manga, and once he began to attend art school, he added a passionate in the surrealists and Jackson Pollock. For Shingu, manga and painting overlap quite spontaneously. In this exhibition, he presents work that straddles the line between the two. Shingu speaks of his work as being a way to visualize the invisible world.

Takura Suzuki’s work explores the idea of the cyborg, which he sees as representing current social phenomena such as data-driven technologies like AI. He metaphorically depicts a world that reflects today’s society, where the line between humans and machines is blurring, and the increasing use of digital technologies complicates the interaction between them. Through his work, he does not attempt to discuss his critical opinions. Rather, he invites the viewers to a complex reality and asks them to understand it in their own way.