From 22 March to 3 May 2025, WKM Gallery is delighted to present Embodied Perspectives, a compelling group exhibition featuring six contemporary Japanese painters: Soh Souen, Iori Nagashima, Koji Yamaguchi, Jun Tsunoda, Kohei Yamada, and Momo Yoshino. This exhibition explores the interplay between corporeality and the two-dimensional realm of painting, focusing on how viewers viscerally experience the artist's unique perspective.
The body's engagement with painting unfolds in three crucial stages: the initial perception of the motif, the physical act of applying paint, and the viewer's ultimate experience of the completed artwork. Embodied Perspectives showcases paintings that subtly yet powerfully incorporate the body as a mediating force, prompting viewers to become acutely aware of its presence - or deliberate absence - within the artistic process.
Soh Souen's intimate, close-up depictions of bodies, rendered with a delicate touch and a pointillist-like style, affirm the enduring importance of physicality in our increasingly digital world, particularly with the rise of social media and virtual reality. Rejecting totalitarian views, Souen emphasises the value of individual experience while simultaneously exploring the connections between individuals. His pointillist technique evokes the cellular structure of life, and his compositions and tones convey the softness and warmth of the human body, filtered through his empathetic gaze.
Iori Nagashima draws inspiration from the vast visual landscape of the internet, film stills, and photographs taken by himself. He masterfully depicts narratives of déjà vu, sometimes adhering closely to the source material, other times expanding upon it through imaginative reinterpretation. Underlying his practice is the theme "Visible things/Invisible things," through which he draws out invisible stories from visible images. These framed moments from others' lives invite viewers to glimpse the narratives unfolding beyond the canvas and vicariously experience Nagashima's perspective.
Koji Yamaguchi, a skateboarder himself, captures the dynamism of urban landscapes, particularly around Kawasaki and Tokyo, with his signature blurred style. His paintings evoke the fleeting perspectives of skateboarders gliding through the streets, and he captures the essence of things through his own slightly impaired vision, unfiltered by preconceptions. This dynamic blurring technique not only creates visually stunning cityscapes but also invites viewers to share in the embodied experience of movement and to trace Yamaguchi's own skateboarding journeys.
Jun Tsunoda integrates organic forms derived from plants and the translucency of minerals into his paintings. Since relocating from Tokyo to the vicinity of the Yatsugatake Mountains in Yamanashi in the late 1980s, Tsunoda has cultivated a deep connection with nature. He explores the essence and purity of nature and materials, informed by his immediate feelings upon encountering them. Employing traditional Japanese lacquer and Shikkui (lime plaster), he seamlessly fuses his distinctive view of nature with his creative process, allowing viewers to perceive his unique perspective on his environment.
Kohei Yamada's abstract paintings, initially appearing as plain colour fields, reveal a surprising depth upon closer inspection. He creates tension among colours and lines, constructing a world within the canvas frame that nonetheless feels continuous with our own. Composed of meticulously layered colours, applied and reapplied to the canvas, they create a sense of depth that draws the viewer into a seemingly bodiless, purely optical space. Yamada's process, which he describes as "hiding backgrounds" rather than simply painting, generates a profound spatial experience.
Momo Yoshino employs optical illusions to actively engage the space between her paintings and the viewer. Her works, which deceptively appear as three-dimensional reliefs reminiscent of folded paper (origami), are in fact two-dimensional paintings. Her reference to origami, which shares the Japanese word kami meaning both "paper" and "god," reflects her Japanese heritage. Her works evoke a feeling of in-betweenness, of presence and absence, akin to the presence of the divine. Unlike Yamada's approach, Yoshino's art heightens the viewer's awareness of their own body and its position in relation to the artwork, creating a dynamic interplay between perception and physicality.
The act of viewing a painting is inherently an act of tracing the painter's perspective and appreciating the dynamic tension between the viewer's physical presence and the artwork itself. While each artist in Embodied Perspectives possesses a distinct style, they all masterfully convey this tension and offer viewers a virtual experience of their unique artistic viewpoints. The six artists featured in this exhibition not only showcase the rich diversity of contemporary Japanese painting but also illuminate its promising future.
