Wednesday. June 15 to Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Tenri Cultural Institute
43A W. 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), New York, NY
Admission: Free
Japanese calligraphy artist Rihaku Inoue and Japanese contemporary painter Koichi Terai collaborate to create unprecedented new works where the expression of Japanese calligraphy embodied by written characters and the liberal shapes and colors of contemporary paintings fuse together into one screen.
In this exhibition, ornately refined contemporary Japanese calligraphy fuses into a visual Japanese setting evoked by lush colors, utilizing each other’s creativity to take on boundless new forms of expression. The production process begins with the creation of a picture from the appearance of a variety of shapes and colors, thinking of the most appropriate characters based on the image of the picture. The characters are then written carefully on a screen. From time to time, additions to Japanese calligraphy and drawings, such as adding more detail to a drawing on a screen, are made until a single piece is completed. The works feature anything from celestial bodies such as the moon, stars, and the universe, to scenery embodying the four seasons, waterfalls and rivers, rain, snow, and more. Well-known haiku, poems, and sayings, as well as verses from the Manyoshu and Hyakunin Isshu Japanese poetry anthologies are selected to suit the abstract screen, and Inoue illustrates the ideas of these works by incorporating them into the shape of the calligraphic characters.
Inoue is a consultant of the Japan Calligraphy Museum and a calligraphy professor at the Japan Education Calligraphy Federation. She is also a member of the A.M.S.C. (Art Maison Selecting Committee/Spain) and Paje de Los Suenos Foundation in Madrid.
Terai studied art at Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music and originally had an interest in European classical works. His main theme is natural phenomenon, such as the earth, air, trees, water, light, and sounds. He draws from events that have occurred in the past year as a means of reflecting upon the social conditions of the country.
Free admission. For more information visit: http://tenri.org/