Toru Kuwakubo - Out of Noise

GALLERY HYUNDAI is pleased to announce its second show of the works by a Japanese artist Toru Kuwakubo (1978-) since the previous representation in Seoul from 2007. The exhibition entitled Out of Noise will consist of 23 of his recent paintings, which the artist has created in the past year for his solo show at GALLERY HYUNDAI. The major works include his large-scale oil paintings that are truthful to his Impressionist-inspired brushstrokes and bright palette, along with his recent canvases that began to introduce darker and richer tone that rather resembles a Fauvist palette. In addition, Out of Noise will introduce a series of vase paintings from 2009 to the audience in Seoul. By juxtaposing surreal elements with the personal narrative, the artist delicately interweaves reality and fiction. Apart from the animation-inspired works that dominate the mainstream Japanese art, Kuwakubo's painting offers a different perspective on the contemporary art scene of Japan with his personal reinterpretations of art historical references and stylistic devices of the modernist.

Through painting Kuwakubo feeds the paradoxical strain coming from the interaction of the two polar forces, life and death, creation and destruction. Although the possible relationship between the high-strung narrative and the artist's personal history cannot be wholly dismissed, one can presume that Kuwakubo as an "artist" might have referenced the history and death of painting. The 20th century art is fraught with paradoxes for it defined itself by declaring the death of art. For Kuwakubo who stands on the threshold of the 21st century, an era where such declaration of death seems cliché, his art cannot but begin with a ritual of death. That may be Kuwakubo's manual on painting.

In Moon of da Vinci, the moons in the sky are reflected on the puddles formed in the holes and increase manifold. Humans roam around the holes like ghosts. The painting does not seem to be about the humans any more but about the moons and stars in the sky and the holes. Human figures are as hazy as ghosts. Fixed Stars and Holes (2009) is a scene even bleaker in which humans do not figure at all. Maybe the humans have hidden inside the holes just as in the vase painting "to avoid noise." So this may be a scene of silence where not a sound exists. And in that silence stars have settled on the holes like crosses or gravestones. A death-like silence. By disappearing like that, is he preparing another act of the laborious "playing artists"? There is no answer for now. There may not be one forever. But one thing is clear: Kuwakubo's constant wrestle with being an "artist" and "becoming artists" is what derives forth his growth and success as an "artist."

Toru Kuwakubo was born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1978. He received his B.F.A. in oil painting at Tama Art University in 2002 and continues work in Tokyo. Since his official debut at The Artist of Tokyo Wonder Wall, sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2003), Kuwakubo's works have been showcased both in and outside of Japan. Notable solo shows include Illusion of the Sea Ebbing Away, Galerie Davide Gallo, Berlin (2006), Scenery of Tomorrow at bendixen contemporary art, Copenhagen (2007), Women Living by the Sea at doART Gallery (2007), and World Citizens with the White Boxes at Tomio Koyama Gallery (2008). His work was shown at GEISAI-5 (2004), a group show curated by Takashi Murakami. The artist was also included in the Younger than Jesus Artist Directory, published to accompany the exhibition organized by New Museum, New York in 2009.

Toru Kuwakubo
Out of Noise