Shuta Hasunuma, Yang Bo, and Nanami Kobayashi "HEAR HERE"

"The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps blurred, as possible."
- Allan Kaprow

Yutaka Kikutake Gallery Kyobashi will be holding a group exhibition featuring Shuta Hasunuma, Yang Bo, and Nanami Kobayashi from Friday, June 6th to Saturday, July 12th. Shuta Hasunuma is a musician whose practice is unconstrained by conventions, while Yang Bo is a painter whose work explores the sense of distance surrounding pop culture and its reception.
The exhibition, titled "HEAR HERE," will feature Hasunuma's video, photographs, and installations, which address the abstraction of musical "systems" and "boundaries," alongside Yang's new paintings, created around the motif of sound and keywords such as ambiguous territory. During the exhibition, a one-day performance will be held with Shuta Hasunuma and sculptor Nanami Kobayashi, who also works as a musician under the name FATHER. In conjunction with the exhibition, the "Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic" will perform in the plaza in front of the Toda Building in Kyobashi on Friday the 6th.

Musician and artist Shuta Hasunuma (born 1983, Tokyo-based) has engaged in a diverse range of practices that challenge the very institution of music through his work and exhibitions in the visual arts, including his work with the 15-member Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra formed in 2010. This exhibition will feature his series "Re-model" (2016), which deconstructs and reconstructs musical media, and his project "Change" (2013-present), in which Hasunuma collects environmental sounds and location information from his everyday field recordings, then attaches images selected from Google image searches and sends them to multiple recipients via email. Also featured is "World in Our Hand," a roughly 10-minute video edited from footage of seemingly inconsequential everyday moments. In a series of short shots, the photographer (Hasunuma) is shown making circles with his fingers. Viewers will notice that music plays while the subject is inside the circle, disappears when the subject is removed, and that environmental sounds return. The movements of the photographer's fingers, creating and removing the circle, evoke the imaginary "boundary" that defines the inside and outside of music, and with a humorous perspective, also bring to light the question that runs through Hasunuma's practice: "What is music?"

Yang Bo, born in Hubei Province, China in 1991 and relocated to Japan with his family in 2001, is another painter who approaches the theme of music from a different angle than Hasunuma. Yang's distinctive compositions feature quotes from 1960s and 1970s musicians like Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop, along with everyday scenes such as roadsides, riverbanks, and interiors. This exhibition will feature a work depicting the view of an airport from a plane before takeoff, along with several other new works. Set in an airport, an indeterminate, neutral space, another aircraft can be seen waiting in the background, obscured. Yang's paintings often use two colors far apart on the color wheel, such as green and red, frequently featuring the murky grays that emerge when two complementary colors blend, emphasizing the unease evoked by this ambiguous realm. This work depicts an airport in bad weather, thunder roaring, and no one knows whether the plane will take off or not. The words "KISS" and lightning flashing in the sky paradoxically accentuate the stillness and silence that permeates the picture plane. The exhibition title, "HEAR HERE," echoes a quote from Allan Kaprow, the founder and practitioner of "Happenings," quoted by Hasunuma - an artist who creates artworks that capture events that could only occur in that moment and place. The musician's approach, which he describes as "attempting to create an unclear space of 'in between,'" resonates with Yang's pictorial compositions, which traverse the realm of ambiguity, creating an exhibition space that is truly unique to the here and now.

The presence of Nanami Kobayashi, who uses embroidery as her base to create sculptures that evoke the compression of time and space, will also add to the strength of this exhibition. Please take note of this unique endeavor in which the practices of these three artists resonate with each other.