"Woman, Sculptor, Music, 5, Luck and Expenditure"
Shoyo Jahana

December 6 - December 21, 2014
12:00-19:00
closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

Shoyo Jahana

Bambinart Gallery is pleased to present "Woman, Sculptor, Music, 5, Luck and Expenditure", a solo-exhibit by Shoyo Jahana.

Jahana was born in Okinawa prefecture in 1987. He graduated in Sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2011 and from the Graduate School at the same university with a specialisation in Intermedia Art in 2013. In both graduation years, he was chosen for the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi, winning the Tomio Koyama prize in 2011 and the Grand Prix award in 2013.

It is a year since his last exhibition, “Amethyst/ Dog barking at the moon/ And I burn down the bridge,” in December, 2013. From the perspectives of a sculpture which uses a woman as motif, music and imagination administered by the mysterious and inexplicable number “5,” in this exhibition the artist attempts to make us experience an encounter with the artist’s journey from setback and failure to creating new things.

“In my work, maybe there is an overwhelming lack of self-criticism. A distinct lack. My work is very self-centred, myopic, far from being an actual narrative, the love and hate of a lover’s spat. I boil it down, pump-it-up and try to generate universalities out of it. I have not tried to conceive of my interests or what my work, as an artist, should actually be. In the last exhibition, I decided to use “I burn down the bridge” in the title. Simply put, this means that I have forfeited the use of a motif.

However, no matter how much we exclude a motif from the work, we do not die – it is not a matter of life and death. I continue to live and live my life with ongoing relationships. Relationships occur out of new encounters as we live our lives. I don’t know the words yet to be able to elevate these relationships, that have just been formed, to the level of the universal. Things are uncertain or dangling in the air.

For this exhibition, I thought it was my role to create my work out of this uncertainty. By rethinking that uncertainty and manifesting it as a physical object, seeing whether that state of uncertainty has a meaning or whether it warrants recognition as something that exists. In a state that is not yet solidified and where the relationship is not yet fully formed. Then observe. I produce something disposable to get started. Then continue to rethink the relationship (there are bad relationships, just as much as good relationships) together with my own poor sense of self-criticism.

Have you seen wild Gnu’s give birth? The newly born calf is soaked in the fluids of its mother and itself and tries to stand by itself by dragging itself out of this quagmire. It learns to stand up and follows its mother and becomes an adult. However, for various reasons, the calf often dies as a result of such things as its bodily constitution not being strong enough when it is born or, unluckily, being hunted by a predator.

This exhibition is an observation about the instability of an artist and the artist’s new way of living and relationships, in other words about life.” Shoyo Jahana

In this exhibition, within this uncertainty, Jahana feels it is essential to return to origins. He attempts to create observations by borrowing from the origins of his own experience as an artist, i.e. sculpture. “Sculpture is the imitation of the physical form,” “5 equals a symbolic number expressing creativity or a metaphor for the physical form.” Centred on his sculptures of the physical form, Jahana again frames this exhibition through a filter of dark magic involving small sculptures, by-products of his work, by-products of his daily life, performance art, visual art and music installed throughout the space “in order to fill the room.” These works have their origins in the relationships that have surrounded Jahana both in the past and in the now.

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