THEME #27Winners2021SEP

OPEN CALL

SHORT LIST

DETAIL

Statement

Destined Walls

Takanori Oguiss was a Japanese painter whose career flourished during the Taisho and Showa periods. He was the first Japanese artist to be allowed to travel to France after World War II, and was known for depicting the cityscapes of Paris.
The creator of the work is a distant relative of Oguiss, who, owing to the painter, has had a painting training and studied the same major at the same university as Oguiss.
Walls are a motif Oguiss preferred to paint, but also are in themselves objects that can be identified with across different times and places.
In this work, in an act of grounding his own self-continuity on the history of another person, the artist captures walls charged with painterly compositions through the eyes of the machine in his hands.

Profile

Tomohiro Kubota

Tomohiro Kubota was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1992. The artist currently lives and works in Tokyo. Kubota completed an MFA in printmaking at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan, in 2020. Kubota’s practice examines our ethical values and the moral criteria by which we navigate our lives, traversing multiple mediums and disciplines including installation and performance.
His most known works include Decision in the Hospice, 2020, which features an incident whereby an artwork by artist Keiji Usami was taken down from a cafeteria at the University of Tokyo without authorization.

Jury selection

Judged by IMA Editorial Team

There are plenty of photographers who originally aimed for painting but how this artist decided to pick up photography due to his roots is interesting. The graphically painted walls in itself seem to be abstract paintings yet, a new world surfaces just by shifting the position of the frame. Because he has captured the relation between painting and photography through his unique perspective, these wall paintings appear as if they are pre-arranged optical illusions. We look forward to seeing how the relation to the painter Takanori Oguiss will develop in the future.