Sokyo Gallery (Kyoto) is pleased to present Yuichiro Kikuma’s solo exhibition, “Traces of the Summer.” This is his first solo exhibition at Sokyo. Kikuma moved to the UK in 2007 to study, and is now based in London, where he has been expressing incidental events in his daily life into his works. While in school, he was selected as one of 18 Japanese and British contemporary artists to participate in the group exhibition “Complex Topography,” a joint project between Tokyo University of the Arts and University of the Arts London. After 2020, he started expanding his activities by holding solo exhibitions in international galleries such as Istanbul, and London This exhibition will feature a total of 10 artworks created in South London, where the artist lives and works.
“My art practice explores the potential for ‘extra’ordinary images that emerge unexpectedly from ordinary objects and daily life phenomena.”
– Yuichiro Kikuma
Kikuma creates images of insignificant everyday objects that we would normally overlook. For example: the drying marks on a wet cloth created by a hairdryer; spray marks created by an atomizer; or the shapes of cut boards used as stencils from students’ design projects. Thus, the images are generated by chance in a controlled environment by incorporating these non-painterly tools and found objects as drawing tools, often in an indirect way. Kikuma mentions that his role in the production process is to be a facilitator rather than a creator, who visualizes the energy of the latent force or heartbeat that flows in all phenomena around us, by giving them expression in various techniques and mediums.
The main works in the exhibition are based on the natural rhythm and form of plants that Kikuma observed in Morden, South London, where he has been living in recent years. Plants by the side of the road, which are usually overlooked, actually have their own unique lines and forms when observed closely. By repeating and composing these forms, unexpected and dynamic rhythms and patterns are created. These processes are also inspired by the music of the 1940’s, which originated from “Musique Concrète,” (also translated as “Gutai Music” in Japanese), and which makes extensive use of sampling techniques. Most of the paintings in this exhibition are silhouettes produced by spraying diluted sumi ink with a gardening sprayer over the gathered plants or other found objects which are laid on fabric. Like cyanotypes, they are both life-size negatives and empty shells of the motifs. He attempted to extract from them a kind of heartbeat generated by aggregation of each living plant.
We hope you will enjoy viewing these “Traces of the Summer” that caught the artist’s eye in the midst of the changing days.