Group exhibition “Freestyle Asians”

Tracing its roots and crossing borders

YUGEN Gallery will be featuring Asian artists for its 2023 opening. Six artists use street art techniques to establish the uniqueness of their own culture and explore global values from there. They are CYH Jason Daicho Wang (Taiwan), Wasin Paisak Hamas (Thailand), Montemis (Thailand), Yasumichi Ichibayashi (Japan), Jin Lu (China), and WOK22 (Japan).

Street culture, which has been on the rise since the 1990s, has presented an alternative view of the world using everyday things around us as a subject. CYH Jason Large Colon King, considered to be the most important figure in Taiwan's graffiti art scene, says, "Ideas come from random daily news, everything around me," and creates works that trace the roots of Taiwanese people through "dirty street art" that adds noise to everyday events, with themes of national character, sex, and religion. Having been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome himself, he sees the lesion as a creation, calling himself "King of Large Colon," and explores the identity of a region that is not easy to understand with his own keen individual consciousness.

In the magnetic force of the street, where diverse values come and go, Wasin Paisak Hamas tries to approach the world before human civilization. He expresses the connection between old and new cultures by drawing strange characters in semi-fluorescent colors on monochrome photographs of Buddha statues and other objects. While producing such works, he launched the art project AT Exchange in his hometown of Ban Phong in the western part of Thailand, inviting various artists from around the world to work in photography, painting, graffiti, and more, and presiding over an art festival. For about two months, he exhibited works and performed live performances in various places in areas where old customs remain, bringing to light the living customs and history rooted in the land and questioning their relationship to the present.

New values born from noise

Ichibayashi Hokumi, who studied traditional Japanese painting, is attempting to establish a Japanese painting expression by a generation born and raised in an era surrounded by man-made things. Moving away from themes that have been passed down in Japanese painting, such as flowers, birds, wind, and moon, he creates "ambiguous paintings" using information he has picked up on the Internet and his own fragmented memories. He visualizes "the noise that arises when the artist entrusts his imagination to his roots about what the era was like and what the process of creating a work is, and the discrepancy that occurs." There is also a skeptical eye towards the grand narratives created by authorities, such as inherited history and culture.

Both artists use noise to unravel the genealogy from their roots to the present and attempt to depict the landscape ahead.

Jinlu expresses the fluctuations of memory and the world through noise. "The world of colors that I sense is constantly changing and moving. I capture it with my first instinct and record it in the shortest time with the crudest techniques," he says. His works, which "leave traces of imperfection" through rough sketches and noisy use of color, depict the imperfections of memory, revealing that the values and world we rely on are fictional. This questioning of current values is something that Ichibayashi shares with us.

Incompatible customs of culture, race, and era intersect, fluctuating and weaving together memories and experiences. The identities that emerge from this intermingling suggest a new landscape.

WOK22's graffiti works, which use natural motifs such as waves and clouds to create a worldview reminiscent of ukiyo-e that is cute yet horrifying, express the fear of the other world and the opposing curiosity. Recently, they have sublimated the subject matter into simple patterns, and are creating works with the theme of all sorts of things moving freely through space and interacting with each other.

Montemis, who develops graffiti art based on traditional Thai techniques such as lacquer and openwork painting, has a theme of "life and Buddhism." He says he is "interested in hell," and paints images reminiscent of hellscapes with a dynamic touch. He seeks to reveal a new realm of values from the Buddhist view of the universe, which sees the world as a dualistic structure of a world of delusion and earthly desires and a so-called paradise that is liberated from them.

Asia, a place that gives a sense of a new beginning

In today's world, where economic and cultural relationships are intricately intertwined, we ponder our own "blood" and "land." Rather than the grand narratives created by nations, we each pick up the small stories that fall out of them with our own personal sensibilities and bring them together. This exhibition takes the perspective that the differences in sensibilities we encounter reveal the depth of our relationships and the stirrings of our souls.

Six Asian artists, whose medium is the streets where incomprehensible people come and go and where raw values are lying around, come together in Shibuya, Tokyo, each with their own roots. This collection strongly suggests that the Asian streets are the "starting point" for the birth of new global values.