A notice of I-MYU’s May show, starting this Thursday.
I Don’t Speak Very Much
Kijune Park / Rui Matsunaga / Miho Sato
15 May – 7 June 2008
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12-6pm or by appointment
I-MYU Projects presents I Don’t Speak Very Much, an exhibition of new works by Korean artist Kijune Park and Japanese born artists Rui Matsunaga and Miho Sato. The works are drawn together by a reduction of visual language and a quiet consolidation of personal and collective cultural drift. The statement ‘I Don’t Speak Very Much’ implicates the artist, the viewer and the artwork, turning each to the subject and consideration of the title. In so doing it unhinges a cultural landscape in which personal and collective experience are understood to be increasingly alienated and alienating.
KIJUNE PARK presents a series of sculptural works, carved wooden figures that take on the form of characters from children’s television or animation. Bear-like these pieces alter in scale between large child-size pieces, becoming almost like costumed kids, to intricately small scale where they exist on strange architectural platforms and improbable raised structures. Across these works the face of the creature is flat and mask-like, each a self-portrait of the artist that replicates knowingly the facial expression prescribed to Buddha, the central symbol of Asian culture. In consequence there is an awkward conflict in these deadpan adult expressions that make the works both intimate and remote.
RUI MATSUNAGA’S drawings and paintings are in contrast frenetic renderings of a continually fracturing yet increasingly collective society. A society that slips irreverently between east and west in which images are not simply devoid of authenticity but also generated without cultural currency, they are lost and removed. Matsunaga criss-crosses not only the here-and-now, but also the past and the present, bringing manga and mythology into a cybernetic amalgam of meditation, cherry blossom and utopian aspiration.
MIHO SATO presents a series of reduced paintings in which isolated figures and singular objects punctuate essentially void spaces, offering both clarity of image / representation and playfulness of content. The reflected body and fin of a shark in water for example, Killer Whale (2007), also takes on the shape and form of an aeroplane, enabling the reduced and apparently simple to resonate with intrigue and affecting humour.
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