Yuka Kashihara uses oil paint applied in a thinly diffuse manner similar to that of Japanese nihonga painting, and by applying it in numerous layers she is able to create a unique depth of color. Within the world of her artworks, scenes from both reality and the spaces of the internal imagination are gently interwoven. Against this backdrop, having left Japan and moved to Germany where she continued developing her practice, Kashihara acquired an interest in the 'distance' between the internal and the external. This included the physical distance between Japan and Germany; and further, the distance herself as a Japanese person and herself while in Germany. This becomes expressed symbolically as an introspective speculation in the forms of the motifs of caves, holes, mountains and lakes which she repeatedly takes up within her work, and through this process of sublimation it is as though the original energies which lie dormant within the great Earth have become awakened. The 'Sky-Eye' of this exhibition's title essentially takes on the meanings of 'the act of seeing what does not exist there, and yet recognizing its existence,' and of 'making the pretense of not seeing things which are seen in actuality'. As for the 'Sky-Eye Weaver', this is the figure which comes to weave together into the scenes within her oil paintings both spatio-temporal awareness and everyday occurrences, and which at once seem to transcend the bounds of memory whilst also seeming not to exceed it. Kashihara's practice amounts to a neologism in itself, symbolically expressing her uniquely individual perspective.For this, her fourth solo exhibition with Tomio Koyama Gallery, we invite you to witness the artistic world of Yuka Kashihara, over-brimming with life force, within which exists both a transparency and a unique depth of intensity.
I was together with someone once, looking at a particular sight, and what that person saw and what I saw were two different things.
My work is about continually searching for and seeking make up those gaps, or slippages, in the openings of such intervals in perception.
Pursuing the light. Loitering within the cracks and crevices.
I once read in a book that, ‘When looking for stars in the night sky, you cannot look straight ahead. If you chase it as if you are going to capture the very tip of your vision, the light increases remarkably in its brilliance.’
Chasing stars is a little like the act of painting.
Place, time and distance, all these various differing locations cut across the various small minor occurrences and memories that lay within me. And then, at the moment when a new scene comes into sight, I felt only slightly as though I had come closer to the world.
Quietly pursuing the ever-shifting gaps that accumulate atop one another in layers as if onecannot ever totally grasp them.
Steadily digging a hole ever deeper and deeper, until before I realize it I have reached the outside world.
The layers in time, gaps in light, and distances in memory accumulate in the existence that I have been chasing yet should also lie within myself. (Yuka Kashihara)
Yuka Kashihara was born in 1980 in Hiroshima Prefecture. In 2006 she graduated from the Japanese Painting of Musashino Art University. In the same year she moved to Germany, and in 2013 she acquired a Diploma from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In 2015, she was named a Meisterschüler (Masters graduate) of the same academy, studying under Professor Annette Schröter. In 2008 she exhibited at the Bauhuas Dessau Foundation in Shakkei (“borrowed scenery”), a solo show curated by research scholar Torsten Blume of the same Foundation, and in 2012 she exhibited in VOCA, Tokyo, where she received both the Honourable Mention Award and the Ohara Museum of Art Award. She has previously held exhibitions with Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Other Exhibition:
Yuka Kashihara "First Island – Last Mountain"
6th September – 27th November 2016
Ohara Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan
For more informations, please visit the following link. http://www.ohara.or.jp/200707/eng/menu.html