Masaomi Yasunaga: Empty Vessel : @ Gallery 85.4 Tokyo

Press:

Bijutsutecho, May 27, 2024

 Richesse, May 15, 2024

 Nonaka-Hill Los Angeles is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new sculpture by artist Masaomi Yasunaga at Gallery 85.4 Tokyo, May 11 – June 16, 2024.

Since ancient times, humans have built homes and lived there, stored various things in containers, and mourned the dead by placing them in coffins. People in the modern era are no different, storing valuable items in suitable vessels. In the broadest sense, vessels are the physical traces of the act of protection and cherishment. In other words, vessels are symbols of our feelings and wishes.

Masaomi Yasunaga

Constantly pushing his already innovative medium to undiscovered places – physically and spiritually – Masaomi Yasunaga’s concretely active and urgently optimistic assemblages of glaze, mosaic, stone and glass offer a psychological intervention, as his interest in the real, temporal, and reliquary world – the ones we know and the ones we do not. “When we dive into a deep contemplation, our minds depart from the present, creating a distance between our consciousness and reality” wrote Yasunaga recently. The result of the quest for beauty fraught with uncontrollable conditions, can be tough on an artist’s ego. Yasunaga’s solution lies at the core of his creative exploration, which is to wholly invest faithfully and unconditionally in the act of firing. As the modelled material undergoes physical changes caused by heat and gravity the objects themselves transition back from the artificial to the natural. The viscous glaze melts, collapses and aggregates within the supportive structure of its pit-firing, resulting in mostly non-functional vessels, shells and empty containers.

Born in Osaka in 1982, the eldest son of an electrical engineer father and a generations-observant devout Christian mother, Masaomi Yasunaga moved with his family to Mie Prefecture as a young child. While a teenager, he encountered the work of Satoru Hoshino at the open campus of Osaka Sangyo University and was struck by its peculiar aesthetic – simultaneously expressive and industrial. Once Yasunaga completed his studies, he moved to Iga, to work as a potter, while simultaneously producing sculptural works. During that time, he fired in a wood-fueled forge, laying the foundations to his current kiln practice. To commemorate the loss of his grandmother, Yasunaga incorporated her ashes into an emblematic glaze which he infused with white porcelain, initiating a process creating objects purely out of glazes. Inspired by the arrival of his first child, Yasunaga began to hybridize his vessel forms with depictions of animals. Rendered in the artist’s earthen materials, these Empty Creatures conjure associations of numerous histories and places, and collectively form an unlikely geologic menagerie. The exhibition at Gallery 85.4 continues the artist’s creative intention posing such voids as vessels for life.

MASAOMI YASUNAGA

EMPTY VESSEL

Gallery 85.4

1st Floor Jingumae Fashion Bldg. 2-6-6 Jingumae,Shibuya-ku Tokyo