Juried Exhibition "Stepping into A World V" at Gallery Max, NYC

2025-04-29

New York, NY

The recent exhibition juried by Kyoko Sato and Motoichi Adachi, "Stepping into A World V" at Gallery Max, facilitated great exchange of ideas, visions, and voices from the Japanese artists in the center of the art world, New York City.

"Stepping into the World V" juried exhibition at Gallery Max

Contemporary artists like Haruka Osaki engages with conceptual, research-based approaches to artmaking, including the study and use of cockroaches to create art and to reflect on what is the essence of being. Just as Sigmund Freud explored the human and normality by studying psychological abnormality, Osaki studies cockroaches as a case study for the bigger question of being and existence, which includes the human. She relinquishes control and thereby gains another kind of control through the will and the movements of the bugs on the paper. The fact that the small creatures' movements appear random may make her work appear to be similarly positioned as the Dadaists engaged with random chance and Fluxus artists staging happenings. However, her work may in fact be ideologically closer to Post Humanism (which argues for reconsideration of the relations between the human, the machine, and the nature). Categorically, Osaki's art may belong to Shock Art and Cyborg Art, especially because, in her previous works, she has installed computer brain into some of the roaches to control their movements.

Haruka Osaki orchestrates a conceptual performance of producing ink-based painting with cockroaches.

Sumiko Sakamoto envisions a distant world in the future when people disappear, and mother nature reclaims parts of human architecture and spaces. Illustrative and poetic in style, Sakamoto combines and arranges scientific and lyrical visuals within a seamless composition. The contrast between the earthen elements and the wondrous and mystical aspects of the cosmos is highlighted by the use of colors. They range from earthen and opaque (for example, raw umber's and yellow ochre's) to ethereal and translucent (involving purple's and blue's) in terms of hue and application. A broken Greco-Romanesque bust in neutral white or greys appears as a part-Asian and part-Buddha-esque representation of the human that encounters infinity and the spiritual realm through self-destruction and erasure. By anchoring the statue onto the lower left corner of the composition, Sakamoto leaves the last ghostly traces of humanity in the form of ancient ruins while simultaneously erasing humanity from the Earth's surface. Without any people left to interpret or to make sense of this ruin, the statue is no longer a statue, no longer art, since art is a human-centric activity and aesthetic process. However, this imagery also highlights the rebellious and free spirit of humanity even in the face of our own extinction. The ghostly human spirits long to have their final laugh, waiting for an advanced alien civilization to discover the statue and to interpret its meaning. When the alien archaeologists discover this marble object, similarly to the Voyager 9 probe designed by Carl Sagan, they may understand its aesthetic value and recognize it as art. The marble object re-transforms into an art object in the eyes of those sentient beings who are able to recognize our own humanity. Thus, by leaving behind art objects and beautiful ruins, humanity will at least be remembered and avoid total erasure.

Sumiko Sakamoto - "Time Passes and It's 2025" (2025), acrylic painting, 28.7 x 24 inches

Antakanta references the Japanese avant-garde Superflat movement in his paintings of two women, who look like twins and are staging a spectacle of looking at a spectacle. Antakanta's work constitutes a cyclical feedback loop of media/social media consumption in today's cultural landscape. The fact that there are two figures occupying the background for Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" means that the work is partially dealing with the concepts of appropriation in and aura of art. Why does the artist erase the original figure of Mona Lisa and replace her with the two women? Actually, the two women, Mona and Lisa, may be a cartoon or anime-like rendition of Mona Lisa as a visual pun on her name, with a contemporary twist. The work is reminiscent of the Japanese blue-chip artist, Yoshitomo Nara.

Antakanta - "Astonishment: Mona and Lisa" (2025), oil on canvas, 14.9 x 17.9 x 1.5 inches

katsuyukiaratake works in a hybrid mode of semi-abstraction and partial representation of a view of irises through a Japanese-style wooden window or door. A distinct harmony of colors can be discerned between the gold, the black, the pink, and the greens. Why is the scenery contained within an amorphous shape, which is then housed within a square canvas format? The dominant vertical line runs through the off-center of the composition and well into the blue background. There are different areas of thick and thin applications, which imbue the work with contrast in terms of the material quality. The artist may be trying to defy formulaic approaches or methods through the variation of compositional and color choices. The occasional wrinkling or texture of the surface is similar to the cracking of oil paintings over a long span of time. Except for the greens, teals, and yellows, the colors aren't quite translucent like watercolor. Rather, they feel milky or opaque, as if whites are directly mixed into the paint. This is different from the glazing technique, which has been applied to the greens, teals, and yellows. Glazing transparent colors would allow for a gradual buildup of paint while relying on the white canvas underneath as the source of highlight, rather than mixing titanium white, which is opaque, directly into the paint. Furthermore, the gold background is iridescent color, which partially reflects light, as if the scene is hit by a warm sunlight. This variation in terms of paint technique, application, and choice of paint creates an interesting economy of visual information in terms of quality of material and light. The artist gently balances the work's configuration, allowing the image to achieve visual depth and richness.

katsuyukiaratake - "Irises" (2024), acrylic gouache painting, 20.9 x 20.9 inches.

All in all, the diversity of media, techniques, visions, and ideas showcased at the juried exhibition indicate a promising future for the Japanese and Japanese American artist community, especially because of the quality of the works by the younger generation artists. Many Japanese artists must be commended for proudly embracing their Japanese roots and heritage in their work. The distinct mix of traditional and modern approaches and concepts that is often found in Japanese art makes them easily recognizable. We cannot wait to see how the artists evolve in terms of their style over the many years to come because art (and life) is a marathon, and they are strongly committed to their artistic voices.