Micro Salon

Kishio Suga

Kishio Suga was born in 1944, Iwate prefecture, Japan. Suga graduated from the Painting Department of Tama Art University in 1968. From the late 1960s onwards, he has been active as one of the central figures of Mono-ha, a sculptural and installation based art movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Through his practice of assembling natural, industrial or found materials into a room size installation piece, he intends to examine the relation between objects, space, and human perception in tandem to the surrounding environment. Suga’s solo exhibitions have been organized by numerous museums in Japan including Kishio Suga Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997; Stance, Yokohama City Museum, 1999; Uncertain Void: Installation by Kishio Suga, Iwate Museum of Art, 2005. His most recent solo show Situated Latency was held at the Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo in 2015.

Takahiro Kondo

• http://www.kondo-kyoto.com

Takahiro Kondo was born in 1958 in Kyoto. He has a unique background being raised by his grandfather, Yuzo Kondo, recognized as a Living National Treasure in the craft of sometsuke ceramic decoration, and his father and ceramic artist, Hiroshi Kondo, and becoming part of the Japanese national team as a table tennis player. He began pursuing ceramics at the age of 25, received the Kyoto City Art Newcomer Award in 1994, and completed a master’s course at Edindburgh College of Art, Scotland.
Kondo began his career creating traditional sometsuke works, but later introduced new media such as metal and cast glass, establishing a unique form of artistic expression. In 1993, he created his original and patended technique Silver Mist (gintekisai), in which a mixture of platinum, gold, silver, and glass is crystallized in granular form on ceramic. This technique, which gives porcelain a delicate shimmer and varied appearances due to the drops on the surfaces, is based on the concept of creating water from fire, using clay as its medium.
Major solo exhibitions include Thoughts on Hands (2017, Kahitsukan, Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art), Seisui: Vessel Shifting (2016, Setouchi City Museum of Art), Self Portrait (2010, The Museum of Arts and Crafts, Itami), Metamorphose (2007, Kyoto Art Center / Nariwa-cho Museum / Paramita Museum), Takahiro Kondo: New Blue & White (1995, National Museum of Scotland). His work is represented in numerous institutional collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA; São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil; Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Guimet Museum, Paris, France, among others.

• http://www.kondo-kyoto.com

Takeshi Hayashi

• http://sarumaihayashi.com

Ministry of Education. In 2012, Hayashi was awarded the Enku Award for Daichito Kyomei – Sozono Genfukei (Earth and Resonance – the Root of Creation), exhibited as part of the Sixth Enku Grand Award Exhibition. Hayashi currently lectures at the Tokyo University of the Arts. His artistic activity has involved taking stones of varying sizes and shapes and arranging them so as to express the relationships that exist between each stone and the space that surrounds them.

• http://sarumaihayashi.com

Shahpour Pouyan

• https://shahpourpouyan.com

Born in Iran, in 1979, Shahpour Pouyan has an MFA in Integrated Practices and New Forms at Pratt Institute, New York, and has an MFA in Painting from the Tehran University of Art. He previously studied Neoplatonic Philosophy at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and received a diploma in Math and Physics from Elmieh School, Tehran. Between 2007 and 2009 he taught art history and the history of Persian Architecture at Science and Culture University, Tehran. He currently lives and works in New York.

Shahpour Pouyan’s work is a commentary on power, domination and possession through the force of culture. His artwork seeks to transform historical or political issues into a monument of poetic and visual form. The repetition of mistakes and errors is one of his main concerns, and he reflects this by bringing historical aesthetics and mediums to his contemporary art practice, for example, reinventing chainmail, helmets and Persian miniatures. His work does not announce a political agenda; instead, he grapples with materials provided from the political world and historic documents; the poetic qualities of power and the human condition inspire him. His recent works and projects are influenced by science, archeology, and the poetry of architectural forms that bridge past and present.

He has participated in Lahore Biennial in Pakistan; National Art Museum of China in Beijing, British Museum in London, and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi Island. His work is part of many prominent private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and etc..

In 2016, Pouyan was shortlisted for the Victoria and Albert Museum Prize, London, UK and has been awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship for Visual Arts in Umbria, Italy. He has participated in several international residencies including International Cite Des Arts, Paris, the Pegasus Art Foundation, Hyderabad, India, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY, USA in March 2014.

• https://shahpourpouyan.com

Isao Sugiyama

杉山功は1977年に東京造形大学彫刻科を卒業後、同大学研究室へ進学。1983年、卒業と同時にイタリアへと渡り、カラーラ美術アカデミーに入学します。卒業後はイタリアに留まり、ミラノ、カラーラを拠点に制作活動を行ってきました。これまで主にヨーロッパで個展を開催し、世界各地のグループ展やアートフェアで作品を発表しています。
杉山の彫刻は大理石と木から成ります。未加工の大理石を自然に見立て、そこに家のフォルムを配置することで、文明の存在をほのめかすのです。ゆっくりと風化していく石と、早々と朽ちて消える木の対比によって、自然の時間と文明の時間の異なるリズムが喚起されます。このような光景を俯瞰する作家あるいは我々の視点は、世界の全体を捉えようとする宗教的なビジョンとも言えるのです。

Hiroyuki Matsuura

• http://hiroyukimatsuura.com/

Hiroyuki Matsuura was born in Tokyo in 1964. It was SUPER ACRYLIC SKIN, an exhibition of Matsuura’s works at Tokyo Gallery in 2005, that marked his transition from designer to artist. Matsuura has gone onto lead an active career both in Japan and overseas, and broadened his repertoire to include the media of painting, sculpture, and print. In 2017, Uki-uki (2012), a 4-metre high work by the artist, was exhibited at Cool Japan: World Fascination in Focus, an exhibition hosted by Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden and Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and served as the main image used to advertise the exhibition. World Fascination in Focus subsequently travelled to Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp, where it was well received.

• http://hiroyukimatsuura.com/

Saya Irie

• http://iriesaya.com/web/home.html

Born in 1983 in Okayama, Irie completed Hiroshima City University’s pre-doctoral art studies course in 2009, and is currently based in Hiroshima. Her work was honoured in the 2009 Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art, and she was the recipient of the sixth Shiseido “Art Egg” award in 2012. Irie’s technique is to rub out a two-dimensional image with an eraser, and then use the eraser residue to recreate the same image in three dimensions. In one work, an image of the goddess Guanyin has been erased from a scroll only to be re-embodied in three dimensions, hovering in space. In another, a portrait on a banknote has been recreated as a bust placed on the bank note. By taking icons that have attained “currency” through their ubiquity, erasing them, and then recreating them as three dimensional sculptures in the same realm as the viewer, Irie’s works ask humorously modern questions about the way we interact with these images.

• http://iriesaya.com/web/home.html

Tomohito Ishii

Tomohito Ishii, born in 1981, is an artist who obtained his M.A. from the Painting Course, Graduate School of Art and Design, Musashino Art University. He creates artworks that problematize visual perception as an information reception device by painting images sourced from his own photographs or existing imagery. In recent years, he has been creating paintings using oil and UV printing techniques, featuring a double image with an inverted depiction of potted plants as motifs. Through this approach, he aims to transform the symbolic recognition of human beings inseparable from urban spaces. In addition to his artistic practice, he also engages in curation activities, such as αM+ vol. 2: My Hole - Hole in Art: Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror.

Chiharu Nishizawa

Born 1970, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. Following his graduation with a major in Painting from the Fine Arts Department of Tokyo Zokei University, Nishizawa continued to work in the medium of printing, but moved to painting as he felt it was quicker at giving form to his thoughts. Having had a solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Gallery in 2003, won an award at VOCA in 2004, his work became critically acclaimed for its combined expression of unease towards society with its dark humor. In 2005 he held a solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery, and continued to garner attention on the international stage with solo exhibitions in Hong Kong and Seoul. His work is known for its detailed, model-like depiction of crowds of people wearing suits or aprons against flat, unreal backgrounds. With his collaboration at Steinway Japan and a museum exhibition being held in Germany, he is continuing to make exciting developments in his work.

SHIMURAbros

• SHIMURAbros ホームページ

SHIMURAbros is a sister-brother duo comprising Yuka Shimura, who was born in 1976 and holds a bachelor’s degree from Tama Art University and a master’s degree from University of the Arts London: Central St Martins, and her brother Kentaro, who was born in 1979 and holds a degree in Imaging Art from Tokyo Polytechnic University. After receiving an Excellence Award in the Art Division of the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival, hosted by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, the pair went onto have their works shown at Festival de Cannes and the Berlinale Festival and exhibited by art galleries in Japan and overseas. In recent years the works of SHIMURAbros have been exhibited at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, and the duo has taken part in the residence program at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA). In 2017, ArtReview Asia magazine named SHIMURAbros as a “future great”. SHIMURAbros relocated to Berlin in 2014 on a research grant from the Pola Art Foundation, where they are currently resident as researchers at the studio of Olafur Eliasson. Recently, the duo was chosen to create the thirtieth commission work for the Aichi Arts Center and the Aichi Prefectural Art Museum, which resulted in Butterfly Upon a Wheel (2022), a series of video works that considers the ongoing issue of refugees, starting with Sugihara Chiune, the diplomat who famously issued ‘visas for life’ during WWII.

• SHIMURAbros ホームページ