Gaze into the Distance: Kenji Sugiyama

This exhibition features Kenji Sugiyama's new works entitled “Gaze into the Distance”, which will be the new development of his ongoing series started from the artist’s personal museums to libraries of the artist’s memory. 

 

The new work “Gaze into the Distance” is inspired by an old-fashioned beautiful theatre. The eye itself, the act of peeping, personal memory and experience, and the fact that people see different things due to their own visual functions. These are the consistent theme in his works, and they are also keys to understand his view of the world.

This work is created based on the image of “a person who blinks”. There are a lot of drop curtains around the theatre. They remind the viewers of eyelashes around an eye and the work itself looks like one big eye.

The audience who can look at the work is only one person and the person gazes into the distant stage. The viewers can see Sugiyama’s previous works on the stage behind, but they also can project their own memories to the screen if they prefer. Although the focal distance between the viewers and the works was close in most of his previous works, Sugiyama set out on a new structure that viewers will look into the distant stage.

 

The space forms a structure like Russian dolls and it invites viewers inside the theatre. The works connect the memories and imagination of the artist with viewers and make them feel integrated as a part of the artwork.

 

The human’s life might be ephemeral just like in the blink of an eye. That is why memories play an important role for human.

In this exhibition, the gallery space itself becomes a mysterious labyrinth constituted of memories of the artist and viewers. Sugiyama will invite viewers to his exquisite and low-technology, old and new world onsite built on his enormous investment of time, which would be hard to convey only in pictures.