The Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce that from October 27th through December 24th it will feature the works of three Asian artists in a public exhibition titled AN EXISTENCE — Chen Ruo Bin - Goro Hirata - Yoon Heechang. This latest exhibition of works by Chen Ruo Bin, Goro Hirata, and Yoon Heechang is the sixth in the Gallery's ongoing “ Asian Art” series, which began with 1994's Promenade Asia exhibition.
The exhibition is a collaborative one in which each of the three Asian artists contributes a different type of element in order to create a single space within the gallery — Chen hanging pictures on the walls, Hirata constructing a small “house” in wax, and Yoon mounting rectangular ceramic pieces on the walls and floors.
■Chen Ruo Bing
Chen Ruo Bin was born in 1970, China.
After studying traditional Chinese painting he moved to Germany to study painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts), eventually turning to focus on creating abstract works in acrylics. His paintings, characterized by warm harmonies of colors and light that beautifully fuse Chinese tradition and German Minimalism, have garnered high acclaim both in Europe and China.
■Goro Hirata
Goro Hirata was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1965.
While traveling with his camping tent in places like China and the Alaskan wilderness he has done fieldwork projects involving the use of local materials to create monuments, and he is also known for installation works that combine dynamism with sensitivity, for example works in wax like the small, white objets in his Mind Space series.
■Yoon Heechang
Yoon Heechang was born in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan in 1963.
His work has consistently focused on installations featuring arrangements of rectangular ceramic blocks. These involve not only firing the clay and creating each piece, but also incorporating each piece into the installation in a way that inquires both into the “existence of the thing” and into the relationships between objects, spaces, and people.
What ties these three artistic approaches together — Chen's “light”, Hirata's “spaces recalling the womb” and Yoon's “terra” — is that each attempts to place within their work a sense of some underlying “root” of the world. Other common elements include the use of rectangular shapes and more plastic soft textures and translucent colors to engender harmony and a sense of lingering reverberation. Not only do these three artists share their intent to iconize and revere the “Nature” that gives rise to all things, they also share commonalities of language in terms of their visual expressiveness. Their respective works become elements in a landscape, standing independently but also finding a quiet resonance with one another.
Moving away from the energetic and kitsch styles so common in Asian contemporary art, the Shiseido Gallery welcomes you to come experience a world rooted instead in stillness and quietude, the “AN EXISTENCE” exhibit representing a more mature form of Asian contemporary art that has resulted from the quiet dialogue among these three artists.
