Sokyo Gallery is pleased to present Kunihiro Akinaga’s solo exhibition “Presence/Absence.” This will be his first solo show at our gallery. In this exhibition, we will show a new series <Part 1> that expresses “permanence” and “transience” by using imaginary creatures and familiar animals as motifs. New works, shown in <Part 2>, further develop his previous skeletal series, “Mimicry.” In this exhibition, Akinaga, who was forced to confine himself to the limited space of his studio during the pandemic, will present a collection of works that have taken new directions.
<PART 1>
In recent years, I have been using imaginary animals as a motif for my work. This is because I felt that the boundaries between reality and unreality, between people and animals and various other things, have become more blurred. – Kunihiro Akinaga
Akinaga attempts to represent the blurring of the boundary between presence and absence by using imaginary creatures such as lions and phoenix and beloved animals as pets such as dogs and cats, as motifs. The society we live in has been inundated by an overflow of information, making it difficult to see what is actually happening. Especially with the advent of the Internet, it is difficult to discern whether the world in front of you is real or unreal. Take, for example, the much-discussed research on the digitalization of the brain in recent years. By converting brain information into data and storing it, it may become possible for humans to continue to exist in a pseudo-network after death, even in the absence of a physical body.
What is presence? Looking at the animals created by Akinaga, we are under the illusion that they may exist in our real world. The exhibition is structured to reexamine our conventional understanding of presence and absence.
<PART 2>
Up until now, Akinaga had been working on the “Mimicry” series based on the theme of “the power of decor.” Inspired by decorative historical constructions such as excessively decorated churches and temples, the works were formed by piling up hand-twisted bone parts one by one, using vertebrate animals as a motif.
This exhibition features not only real animals, such as monkeys and spoonbills, but also imaginary creatures such as dragons and centaurs. These new creatures will be exhibited here for the first time. What does “decoration” really indicate? Akinaga believes that decoration is an act of satisfying human desires and disguising the true nature of things. People decorate themselves with makeup, accessories, clothing, tattoos, etc. out of vanity and the desire to appear beautiful or strong.
The combination of “skeletons” and “decorations,” which represent death as well as the shaping of animals, expresses “disguise and desire” and “transience.” For example, the ribbons of the Christmas chicken give you a sense of the permanence of human desire to enjoy the meal, while the bones and decorated ribbons, which have been trashed after the meal, give you a sense of transience after being satisfied. The decoration disguises the death of the animal, blurring the relationship between life and death and even between human and animals.
Ceramics, if not broken, will continue to exist in perpetuity, like Japanese Jomon pottery. In the second part of the exhibition, we hope the viewer will explore the nature of things covered by the veil of decoration, through works made in ceramics that possess both permanence and transience.
