Tokyo Arts and Space presents ACT Vol. 5: Ungraspable

Tokyo – ACT Vol. 5: Ungraspable will be on display at Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) from February 11 to March 26, 2023.

Visual Arts Events

February 27, 2023

Clockwise, from top left: Samejima Yui, Fragments of unvoiced voices, 2022; Ebihara Yasushi, Rose#01, 2009; Sudo Misa, Moon (the Crater Daedalus), 2021. Photo: Kato Ken; Ebihara Yasushi, explosion#01, 2008; Samejima Yui, Yobitsugi (festival music), 2022; Sudo Misa, Saturn, 2021. Photo: Kato Ken.

ACT Vol. 5: Ungraspable will be on display at Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) from February 11 to March 26, 2023.

Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has consistently and at various phases of their careers supported the activities of artists through open-call exhibitions, special showcases, and foreign exchange programs. ACT (Artists Contemporary TOKAS) is a TOKAS-hosted exhibition program that focuses on artists who have previously participated in any other TOKAS-hosted event. This fifth edition, starring Ebihara Yasushi, Samejima Yui, and Sudo Misa, strives to depict invisible presence and provoke interactions between substance and imagination on diverse scales.

This time, Ebihara exhibits video freeze frames; Samejima exhibits historical materials relating to ancient ruins; and Sudo exhibits works based on space observation data. They are all renderings of fragmentary moments and phenomena, capturing things we can perceive but not recognize, things we have lost, or things we will never see, while inviting our imagination to the immense expanses of space and time that each of them involves. The works of the three artists exhibited here are informed by various perspectives and approaches, but they all function as messengers of the invisible presence that lurks behind them.

Artists
Ebihara Yasushi
Born in 1976. Ebihara has been exploring the fleetingness of mass-consumed subjects and fading memories, by various means including painting, sculpture, photography and performance. The “NOISE” series that is showcased at this exhibition, consists of oil paintings of movie scenes captured in freeze frames from video tapes.

Samejima Yui
Born in 1988. Samejima focuses in her creative work on paintings themed on connections between “visible things” and “invisible things,” or visualizations of the boundary between the two realms. In the “Yobitsugi” series, she orchestrates the exhibition space with a diverse array of works themed on ancient ruins, tools that are no longer used, tradition and occultism.

Sudo Misa
Born in 1982. Sudo attempts to express in her works the “universe” as something that is difficult to grasp, while reducing her distance from it, through pictures from outer space and motifs related to astronomy. In this exhibition, Sudo unveils an installation combining motifs including the Sun, Saturn and Milky Way, based on interviews with researchers and collected data.