MOT Annual 2008 : Unraveling and Revealing

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo each year selects a theme reflecting significant art trends and social phenomena and holds a MOT Annual exhibition featuring young artists. This year’s exhibition, “Unraveling and Revealing,” presents the work of five artists: Teppei Kaneuji, Mariko Takahashi, Fumio Tachibana, Aiko Tezuka, and Toshiaki Hicosaka.We live amid a superabundance of things and information. While enjoying unprecedented convenience and amplitude of choice, we nevertheless find it harder in our plentitude to grasp the outlines of things and the borders giving them distinction. In this respect, to unravel the things before us can help us know their structure and the reality behind them. By acquainting ourselves with each component part and confirming its weight and how it feels to the touch, we can better know and appreciate the thing as a whole. Each of the five artists featured in this exhibition unravels the world, attempting in his or her own fashion to look deeply into the structure and content of things. We are pleased to present the fruits of their investigations, including ambitious new works they have created for this exhibition. Combining drawing with the medium of print, Toshiaki Hicosaka (born: 1983) fragmentizes a visual scene, then carefully selects fragments, draws them, and creates a new scene. In photographs taken in ordinary room lighting, Mariko Takashi (born: 1970) deconstructs the familiar outlines of everyday motifs and her own relationship with such motifs. Teppei Kaneuji (born: 1978) employs unlikely combinations of materials to give things new outlines, thereby rendering fluid and ambiguous their divisions. Aiko Tezuka (born: 1976) unravels woven fabrics, pulling apart their woof and warp yarns to reveal the inner structure forming their surface patterns. Through his use of paper and lettering in graphic design and books, Fumio Tachibana (born: 1968) causes us to rediscover the shapes and material qualities of things. By “unraveling and revealing” the seemingly ordinary things around us, these artists awaken us to a world astonishingly rich in its depth and complexity.