AWT Focus Selections: Kenjiro Hosaka
Kenjiro Hosaka, Director of the Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu, selects works from AWT Focus, EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE: VISIONS OF THE FUTURE FROM ASIA under the theme of ALTERNATE HISTORIES OF ABSTRACTION FROM ASIA.
Recent years have seen a growing movement to locate the origins of abstract painting not with Vasily Kandinsky, but rather Hilma af Klint. Yet that argument really only pertains to oil painting on canvas. If representations of spiritual worlds like those envisioned by af Klint now count as abstraction, then we should be able to trace the roots back even further. Although it includes a number of figurative works, Mami Kataoka’s AWT Focus exhibition is a powerful statement on the need to rewrite the Eurocentric narrative of abstraction. For instance, the first section of Kataoka’s exhibition, “Cosmic Structures,” includes Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s installation of scores of wing- and flower-shaped objects, with the former symbolizing life that soars in the sky and the latter life that grows in the ground. The objects have been rendered in an almost primeval medium, terracotta, and are arranged on the wall in a simple yet rigorous grid of repeating forms. Standing before the work elicits a flash of insight into how creativity has developed alongside humanity as we inhabit the cosmos of nature.
Another section, “Invisible Powers,” features a work by Namika Nakai, an emerging ceramic artist who makes effective use of the form of the loop. Loops flow naturally from our bodily gestures, whether as simple circular patterns or as wavy lines. It is perhaps precisely for this reason that the loop so readily evokes the cosmic logic that connects the micro and the macro. - Kenjiro Hosaka
Kenjiro Hosaka is Director of the Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu. He was formerly Curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), where he organized major exhibitions of figures ranging from painters Leiko Ikemura (2011) and Francis Bacon (2013) to avant-garde poet and multimedia artist Yoshimasu Gozo (2016) and architect Kengo Kuma (2021). His thematic surveys include “Where Is Architecture? Seven Installations by Japanese Architects” (2010) and “The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945” (2017), both at MOMAT, as well as “Logical Emotion: Contemporary Art from Japan,” which toured from the Haus Kontruktiv in Zurich to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, in 2014–15. In 2023 he was the inaugural curator of AWT Focus for Art Week Tokyo.
