Yukako Manabe
Japanese series
HIDDEN Bořivojova
20.11.24 / 31.1.25
I am delighted to continue our series at HIDDEN Bořivojova, spotlighting contemporary Japanese artists. The second exhibition features the works of Yukako Manabe.
Yukako Manabe
Born in Tokyo in 1994, Manabe graduated from the Japanese Painting Department at Tokyo University of the Arts and later completed her master's in Printmaking at the same university. She employs techniques from both Japanese painting and printmaking to explore the boundary between everyday life and imagination. Major exhibitions include her solo show "たたずむあの人(The girl, standing still)" at Isetan Shinjuku Tokyo, as well as her participation in ART FAIR TOKYO 2018 at the Tokyo International Forum and Art Expo Malaysia (MECC). From 2019 to 2020, she studied in Poland as an ERASMUS+ scholarship student.
I start creating my work from the question, 'Does something that exists only in my mind mean it doesn't exist in the world?'
If I visualize something that exists only in my mind, does that mean it exists in the world? Or is it when I show it to someone? Or is it when it takes shape in someone else's mind? At that moment, have I slightly altered the composition of the world?
This is the third exhibition of contemporary Japanese art in the series "HIDDEN Bořivojova", this time presenting Tokyo-based artist Yukako Manabe. Her works fuse the "coniunctio oppositorum" of mundanity and imagination, where dreams penetrate reality like a lunar ray through a midnight landscape, which then appears completely different to us than during the day. In the same way, this artist dresses reality in a new guise, which is a dreamy imagination and a melancholic vision. She projects ambiguous feelings and ephemeral impressions into her paintings, which cannot simply be expressed in words, thus forming her own visual "language", where meanings are not composed in sentences from individual words, but the composition of the painting themes narrates a story through individual artistic depictions.
The perception of the works transitions from ordinary interpretation to the realm of hermeneutics, where the author leaves the viewer "in suspenso" regarding meanings, allowing the significance of the images to spontaneously form within him – similar to how a concrete image is born under the surface of a seemingly abstract stereogram. The ascetic minimalism of airy, graphically light drawings stands in stark contrast to the contemplative moment when we ask not only about the meaning of the work but also about the meaning of our own being. The artistically transparent yet conceptually multilayered compositions synthesize the dialectics of everyday reality (often featuring motifs of animals and human gestures) with surreal constellations of things and events (mermaids, extra fingers, etc.), which asynchronize logic. We must ask, what is reality and what is a dream, as if we were the protagonists of the enigmatic movie "Inception".
The works reflect the disjunction of two silences – the silence of lethargic repose, but also the silence of melancholic grief that we feel when looking at a falling snowflake, where poetic beauty merges with the inevitability of its soon demise. This twofoldness full of content parallels, where we cannot tell whether the swan is adorably sleeping in tranquility or grievously weeping for the lost Lohengrin, is characteristic of the author. Is a person in the mouth of a bear a fairy-tale vision from a Brothers Grimm story, or are we witnessing how a ferocious predator devours a man like the merciless god Cronus his own child? No answer is correct, yet both are right – we are dealing with Schrödinger's cat incorporated into the image. When we calm our minds, perhaps we will hear it purring softly…
In Yukako's compositions, timelessness reigns comparable to the moment between two heartbeats or the infinitely long second of "little death" in physical love ecstasy at the threshold between joy and sorrow. The subtlety and distinction of individual drawing strokes evoke the minor chords of Chopin's piano play on the black and white keys, corresponding with the prevailing monochromaticity of the exhibited works. The boundary between object and subject is blurred in Yukako's drawings, as when we look into a fogged mirror after a hot bath. However, the despecified meaning of contours gains a new intellectual breadth and aesthetic charm through the loss of its unambiguity.
In her heartfelt works, the artist emphasizes the role of sensory experience in shaping knowledge of our world. Thus, life is not enough to only observe; it must be consciously experienced for us to understand it more deeply. Our thoughts can grasp reality only if we also recognize that we are an integral part of the present moment. As the French philosopher Louis Althusser stated: “On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a "real" object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that is external to thought itself.” Therefore, we can achieve that "true knowledge" only when our thoughts accurately reflect the nature of external things without being influenced by other disturbing factors. By sneakily undermining our reality through various tricks and snares, the painter actually brings us closer to it, making us vigilant. What a cunning paradox!
The author removes people and objects from the context of everyday life and presents them to us as "self-given" phenomena of the natural world (Lebenswelt), inverting the Husserlian moment of "noesis" back to "noema". By showing us the world from new perspectives, she teaches us to suspend judgment about things in accordance with the ancient Greek principle of "epoché". The artistic depiction of human experience with the world, alongside a dynamic visual composition with unconventional perspective and excellent observational skills can already be found in the traditional Japanese form of "Ukiyo-e", such as in the works of the famous Hokusai. However, Yukako also manages to incorporate into her art a kind of gentle sadness and nostalgic longing for something that has already ended or has yet to begin. The mood of the works is similar to the sensitive photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto with a minimum of colors and a maximum of emotions, especially in his images of sea horizons. Our artist manages to connect heaven with earth and reality with infinity in one lone line too…
Let us immerse ourselves in contemplation of the lyricism of the exhibited works and allow the words of the contemporary Czech philosopher, Luboš Y. Koláček, resonate within us: “In mysticism, which assumes that the human heart is a mirror of the divine, contemplation becomes the main method of knowledge. Here, by focusing on one’s own heart, on inner experiences, the divine and the transcendental are revealed and touched.”
– Kamil Princ
「HIDDEN Bořivojova」シリーズの第3回現代日本美術展では、東京を拠点とするアーティスト・真鍋由伽子を紹介します。彼女の作品は、日常と想像の「対立」を融合させています。夢は真夜中に現実を照らす月光のように、現実を変容させ、昼間とは異なる世界を見せます。真鍋のアートは、言葉で表現しきれない曖昧な感情や儚い印象を投影し、独自の視覚「言語」を形成します。その意味は、個々の描写の積み重ねによって語られる物語のように構築されています。
彼女の作品は、鑑賞者を「解釈のサスペンス」に誘い、意味を自発的に見出す余地を与えます。まるで抽象的なステレオグラムから具象が浮かび上がるように、彼女のミニマリスティックなドローイングは、私たちの存在や人生の意味について瞑想的な問いを投げかけます。彼女の構成は、日常の現実と、夢のような不条理を融合させたものです。作品の中では、現実と幻想の境界が曖昧になり、鑑賞者は「現実とは何か？」を問わざるを得ません。
真鍋の作品には、二つの静寂が共存しています。一つは穏やかな安らぎの静寂、もう一つは雪が舞い落ちるときのような憂鬱な静寂です。この二重性は、彼女の特徴ともいえます。たとえば、熊の口の中の人間のモチーフは、童話的な幻想にも、残酷な神話的捕食者の象徴にも見えるのです。この曖昧さが、彼女の作品に知的な深みを与えています。
彼女の描画は、熱いお風呂の後に曇った鏡を見るような、境界の曖昧さが特徴的です。それによって明確さを失うどころか、新たな美的広がりを生み出します。さらに、感覚的な体験を通じて私たちの現実認識を深める重要性を強調しています。
真鍋はまた、物事を異なる視点から見せることで、フッサールの「現象学的還元」やギリシャ哲学の「判断保留」に通じる態度を示しています。その視覚的構成には、日本の伝統美術や北斎の浮世絵に共通するダイナミズムと観察力が感じられます。しかし彼女の作品は、杉本博司の写真に似た静けさと、過去や未来へのノスタルジアも内包しています。
この展示作品を通じ、現代チェコ哲学者ルボシュ・Y・コラーチェクの言葉が思い出されます。「人間の心は神の鏡である。瞑想を通じて、私たちは自分の内面を見つめ、超越的な真実を垣間見ることができる。」真鍋由伽子の作品は、私たちをそのような内省へと誘います。