Shining Stars, Babbling Brooks, Chorusing Cicadas

Event

http://www.hrdfineart.com/exb-stars23.html

Venue

Overview

Yiling Liu was born in Changhua, Taiwan in 1989, and is currently enrolled in graduate school at Kyoto City University of Arts. Though primarily a painter, she creates a diverse body of work that includes the use of soft, formless material as well as installation works combining video and sculpture with painting. The creatures that she depicts in her works, reminiscent of some manga characters, are her alter egos; but at the same time they are also images that reflect all living things that surround her life. Or rather, those creatures symbolize the relationship between the artist and all other lives.

Miho Tsujimoto was born in Osaka in 1994, and completed the master course at Osaka Kyoiku University. Her creation centers on abstract expression using oil paints. Green, orange, yellow and other hues that exude the vigor of nature and life, as well as the physicality of thickly applied oil paints, are the characteristics of Tsujimoto’s painting. Recently she also started working on non-geometric, free-form canvases. With these aspects, her paintings seem to highlight the chaoticity of the world, which, however harmonious it may look, contains contradiction, confusion, and unpredictability in abundance, and thus rejects clear-cut, simplified understanding.

This exhibition puts on display the works of two emerging female artists who have set out on a journey to discover the world through their art. With different backgrounds and different styles of work, Liu and Tsujimoto share the same sincere and honest attitude to explore the senses and feelings of the here and now.

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The title of the exhibition, “Shining Stars, Babbling Brooks, Chorusing Cicadas,” was quoted from a passage of the novel by Natsuki Ikezawa, “Still Life,” which, to their own surprise, happened to be their common favorite book.

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Artists’ Statement

I often use wastes and rubbish and make them into artwork, as they relate to the pain and the beauty of life. I touch the borderline between the thrown-away and the salvaged; the valuable and the valueless; and the fictitious and the truthful.
Measuring the distance between myself and the world, and exploring how to determine what’s valuable, I keep searching for the way of living that would fit me best.

I feel like painting when my heart is full of love.
Casually, I depict motifs that I adore. It feels like caressing the world with my eye and my hands. I realize that even clay and paint are the extension of my own body.
The moments that I want to immortalize cannot be immortalized. I know it. So I want to physically imprint those moments in my work, even if they are only ashes or lingering scents. Please come to see the traces of my love; in early summer, in midsummer, or even in the afternoon torrential rain.

– Yiling Liu

From this year, I have started working on free-form canvases. Some shapes look like a star or a bird; a pond or a stone; or even a hole that has suddenly appeared within this world. Non-geometric canvases can take various forms, connecting with the world according to each viewer.
They are, I feel, similar to poetry and fortunetelling as they can stand close to the heart of each of us. And at the same time, I want my artwork to exert a physical presence in this world where our bodies and souls exist.

The title of the exhibition, “Shining Stars, Babbling Brooks, Chorusing Cicadas,” was quoted from a passage in the beginning of Natsuki Ikezawa’s novel, “Still Life,” which always inspired and encouraged me whenever I was unsure about my work. When I met Ms Liu for the first time, I learned that the novel was also very special to her, and I was greatly surprised by the coincidence.

– Miho Tsujimoto