“What things are really important?”

This question often came up during the coronavirus pandemic, as so many of our priorities and values underwent a drastic change. In the past, I was afraid that I might be forgetting something important as I obsessed over routine concerns, but the pandemic provided me with a chance to stop and think. As I was reconsidering my everyday life, my family, and other things, I was also thinking about planning this exhibition. I came up with the idea of making an exhibition that would send a message to others who had also stopped and thought about things.

Words are tools that we use to tell stories, convey information, and think. However, we harbor the fear that we cannot translate our emotions into words, and art expresses this fear in a variety of ways.

While exploring the power of language, and the forms that cannot be expressed in words, this exhibition focuses on two artists responses to the question at the top of the page.

Miyake Mai fuses traditional Japanese aesthetics and craft techniques with a contemporary approach. Based on the Japanese art format of calligraphy, Miyake has created a world out of “things that can be expressed through language and things that cannot.” She searches for the silent voices of history and culture in the places where her works are being shown, and by combining them with a given concept or exhibit, she develops site-specific works in each area. In this exhibition, Miyake has set herself the challenge of making a large-scale installation that deals with ships and water – subjects that are well-suited to the Kanagawa Prefectural Hall, located as it is in a port town that is connected to the wider world. Miyake takes a serious look at issues such as what it means to “understand,” and the things that people accept and reject.

Meanwhile, Kasetsu explores the relationships between nature and people based on the composition of kanji, a writing system that was created by the ancients, and expresses these things through the calligraphic image
of a single character. Kasetsu also weaves the kanji into a text in which she reflects on the connection between the character and herself as someone living in the contemporary era, creating an installation out of calligraphy and the written word. In this exhibition, Kasetsu uses the kanji ki (tree) as a means of reconsidering the fundamental human emotion of awe in regard to nature, while making work that deals with the human act of extracting words from the depth of their spirit and writing them.

In addition to showing their works at art festivals, and solo and group exhibitions throughout the country, Miyake Mai and Kasetsu are active as writers. Although they work in similar fields, this exhibition marks the first time that the two artists have actually crossed paths. Like the yin and yang in Eastern thought, or two sides of the same coin, the relationship between light and shadow in words emerges here as a single world, ceaselessly flowing and assuming different forms.

Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery