YUGEN Gallery will hold Mayumimasa's solo exhibition "quiet passion" from Saturday, July 15th to Thursday, July 20th, 2023.

passion for the future

Japanese culture on fire

“In the city of Kyoto, there are things around us that have been closely linked to people’s lives and have been handed down for a long time.

Mayumi strongly recognizes that the basis of her values ​​is her Japanese identity. It is said to be "rather than discovering something, it's the feeling of finally opening a drawer that you haven't been able to open." It was the solo exhibition "PAINTINGS" held in Kyoto last fall that gave me the opportunity to sublimate my daily life to express things that can only be expressed by Japanese people.

One of the works that was born at that time was "Usho". The sight of cormorant fishing, which he used to watch with his parents since he was a child, is depicted as a mental landscape of Japanese people, with a sense of realism where you can feel the sharp sparks and the temperature of the flames. In this way, the passion passed down by ordinary people and the faith that maintains a calm heart are also called "passion." ”.

“The burning flames never go out.
Affected by various events, the flames continue to burn even after being crumpled.
At the root of that flame is the spirit of words, the Shinto and Buddhism, and the culture that has been handed down from generation to generation in Japan. In today's world, where new things are born and disappear in the blink of an eye, they no longer exist as absolutes.
However, even in this era, there are things that can be left to posterity because it is such an era. Confront the world with a power that can never be seen.”

The driving force behind Mayumi's creative work is to escape from the trap that calligraphers write letters and painters draw pictures, and to confront common sense and preconceptions head-on. Letters, paintings, three-dimensional figures are different, but the work is the flesh and blood of the artist. Mayumi says that the passion that is engraved in the work is not the artist's, but the passion that sleeps in the viewer's heart.

In addition to two-dimensional works, three-dimensional works that took five years to conceive will be exhibited for the first time in Japan. We will exhibit 23 two-dimensional works and 4 three-dimensional works made of bronze clay and finished with lacquer.

Appearance of character gravity

“The production work of layering clay on the core material and fleshing it out is a physical experience. I realized it again."

Mayumi has always had the image of letters appearing in space, and the work depicting three-dimensional letters standing tall in the landscape, such as "From the North Sea, a distant Genbu study," became a reality. . Through the production of three-dimensional works, I am renewing the feeling of the consistent theme of my creative activities, "oozing life."

Before the birth of paper, characters developed as a means of communication and recording were copied from clay tablets and animal bones. Paper was born from convenience such as storage and transportation, and then to digital. It seems as if the history of letters was the release of gravity. Mayumi's series of works can be seen as a reacquisition of the primordial physicality of characters such as clay, animal bones, and grooves carved into them.

"I don't want people to forget that there was a definite passion in the current era. I want to make that wave fly big and leave it as a message for the future."

Mayumi, who is currently 25 years old, was born and raised in an era where she "types" letters rather than "writes" them. A new generation taps into the passion that words harbor.