Contemporary Art Gallery

FEATURED ARTWORKS

ARTISTS' PROFILES

Hiraki Sawa

Born 1977 in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. Lives and works in London, UK.
Graduated from MFA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art in London. Sawa creates video works that transform actual landscapes into strange compositions that incorporate fragmentary collages of video footage of his own home, objects and landscapes shot from a unique angle that embody a surreal view of the world. His work Dwelling (2002), which depicts an airplane taking off and landing in a kitchen, won him much acclaim. Since his solo exhibition “Hiraki Sawa, hako” (Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2007), Sawa has been creating distinctive multi-channel video installations with a meditative atmosphere that make effective use of soundtracks. He is one of Japan’s most promising and internationally oriented young artists, exhibiting regularly at museums and art festivals around the world.

Naohiro Ukawa

Born 1968 in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.
Transcending the realms of fine art and pop culture, Ukawa pursues a wide range of activities as a contemporary artist, VJ, DJ, designer, writer and university professor. Since returning to Japan from San Francisco in 1998, he has exhibited his work at a variety of institutions and group exhibitions, including “JAM Tokyo – London” (Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2002). He has received numerous awards at international digital film festivals, including Ars Electronica and RESFEST, and collaborated with top creators in various fields, handling art direction for clients that range from the Boredoms to Bulgari. As a VJ, he has worked with Jeff Mills and Merzbow, while his writings cover a range of diverse subjects, including an introduction to the work of Nikola Tesla and research on Tetsuo Ishidate.

Jeremy Deller

Born 1966 in London, UK. Lives and works there.
Deller has been organizing projects all over the world that are realized through the participation and collaboration of a wide variety of people, including ordinary citizens. His work deals with cultures and people often deemed marginal, rather than mainstream topics. One of his most representative works, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), is a reenactment of one of the most significant conflicts in the modern industrial history of England that erupted between the police and coal miners in 1984. The incident was reenacted and filmed with the participation of ordinary citizens, including miners who had been involved in the actual event. Deller received the Turner Prize in 2004 for his installation work Memory Bucket (2003), which was based on a documentary about Crawford, Texas – the hometown of former US president George W. Bush – and the siege of a ranch belonging to the religious sect Branch Davidian in the adjacent town of Waco. Deller is one of the UK’s representative contemporary artists.

Chim↑Pom

Six-member artist collective formed in 2005, made up of Ryuta Ushiro, Ellie, Yasutaka Hayashi, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka and Toshinori Mizuno. Chim↑Pom started making art by using "a video camera and winsome charm as weapons", creating a series of works that intervened directly in society. Their solo exhibition "Super☆Rat" (2006), which consisted of film footage of members hunting down rats in Shibuya, as well as the captured rats stuffed and made to resemble the "Pikachu" character from the Pokemon cartoon, attracted much media attention. In 2008, they caused a major uproar after using the smoke cloud from an airplane to write the word "pika" (flash) in the sky above Hiroshima during the filming of a new video piece. The act sparked off a string of events that included the withdrawal of a scheduled exhibition, a public apology made to an association of atomic bomb victims, and the publication of a book ("Naze Hiroshima no sora wo pika tto sasete wa ikenainoka", Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009) as a form of self－reflection over the incident. In addition to solo exhibitions at commercial galleries in Tokyo, Chim↑Pom have also shown work at group exhibitions overseas, such as "When Lives Become Form: Dialogue with the Future - Brazil, Japan" (Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, 2008) and "Kita!! Japanese Artists meet Indonesia" (Jogja National Museum, 2008).

Hikaru Fujii

Born 1976 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works there.
Moved to France in 1995 and graduated with a doctoral diploma in advanced studies (DEA) in Athletic, Sciences and Technology of the Arts from the University of Paris VIII. Having previously worked as a media artist, since his return to Japan in 2005 he has shifted his practice towards work that deals directly with contemporary Japanese society and politics. His coherent interest lies in the relationship between social activism and art. Currently works as an instructor at the citizen media center MediR while advocating for increased citizen participation in the creation of video works through workshops aimed at high school students and temporary workers, as well as giving lectures and talks at universities and art schools. His work has been shown at exhibitions such as the Jiro Yoshihara Prize Commemorative Art Project (Osaka Contemporary Art Center, 2007).

Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf

Artist duo consisting of performance artist Wermke (born 1978 in Berlin, former East Germany, lives and works in Berlin) and film director Leinkauf (born 1977 in Berlin, former East Germany, lives and works in Berlin). Wermke and Leinkauf make video works that document guerilla performances in urban public spaces, cleverly exposing the internal loopholes and contradictions that lie within public systems in works such as In-Between (2007-8), which explores the inner workings of the Berlin subway system, and Thanks Anyway (2006), in which Wermke cleans the windshields of public transportation vehicles while they stop for a traffic light. They have previously shown their works mostly at film festivals, winning prizes for Best German Upcoming Filmmaker at Filmfestestival Hannover "up-and-coming" and Best Experimental Short at Int. Filmfestival "Ohne Kohle" in Vienna.

Aki Yahata

Born 1985 in Tokyo. Lives and works there.
Currently enrolled in Department of Intermedia Art at the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts. This young artist trains her camera on eccentric people that seem to have come straight out of a story – a clown who lives in a makeshift blue tent by the side of a river, an old couple who build and run their own church in the mountains, the owners of a quirky bakery – doing all the legwork and research by herself and shooting in a documentary style. Yahata’s works portray a world in which no clear distinction is made between reality and fiction, relating the little narratives that lie on the margins of society from the point of view of one who has transcended the framework of truth and falsehood altogether. Her work has been shown at exhibitions such as "Kanazawa Art Platform 2008" (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2008).

Ryan Trecartin

Born 1981 in Texas, USA. Lives and works in Philadelphia, USA.
Trecartin makes bewildering feature-length videos that feature his own friends and acquaintances. His works strongly reflect the condition of a generation that has come to feel at home with the imaginary spaces constructed by computers, the Internet and video cameras. Set against the backdrop of a contemporary society flooded with an excess of information, Trecartin’s videos tackle issues associated with sexual minorities, including gay and transgendered people, as well as problems related to identity and ontology, such as one’s alter ego. Since his landmark work I-BE Area (2007), which first won him critical attention, and his first solo museum exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2008, numerous group exhibitions and film festivals have screened his work, including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” (New Museum, New York, 2009). Trecartin is one of America’s most high profile up-and-coming artists.

Laurent Montaron

Born 1972 in Verneuil-sur-Avre, France. Lives and works in Paris, France.
Montaron's practice centers on contemplative video works that make use of rhetorical video devices such as loops to tackle phenomena and philosophies that cannot be verified using visual means, such as fortune telling, precognition and dreams. He has shown at numerous museums and galleries in Europe and America, but mostly in France, where he held solo exhibitions at the IAC in Lyons and the FRAC de Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, both in 2009.