山本 浩貴
Search for a Stone
Group Exhibition
山本 浩貴
Search for a Stone
Group Exhibition
2022.8.27 Sat. — 9.11 Sun.
Opens every day during the exhibition
10:00 — 18:00
Shibunkaku Ginza
Ichibankan-Building
5-3-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061, Japan
Hiroki Yamamoto
Artists, collectors, curators and gallerists govern the world of beauty.
Yet today, value is often consumed in the blink of an eye. On a timeline from the past to the future, curators weave the fabric of art and therefore play a critically important role in shaping the art scenes to come. In the present day, when standards of value are questioned and in disarray, their sensibilities and intellect take on a particular significance.
Shibunkaku Ginza is pleased to announce the launch of “Ginza Curator’s Room,” an exhibition series centering on curators. This program welcomes different curators each time who will create “rooms” that introduce new perspectives and modes of seeing, reflecting their unique points of view.
Ginza is a place where in the old days the Kano school of painters maintained their workshops, and cultural figures have gathered here since the Meiji era. We look forward to welcoming you to Ginza, a continuous springboard of ever-rejuvenating fashions.
Ginza Curator’s Room #001 Yamamoto Hiroki: Search for a Stone takes a poem by the Italian artist Bruno Munari (1907–1998) as its starting point. For Yamamoto, stone is not simply an object from nature but defined as a stand-in for the whole of the natural world that surrounds us humans. He thus examines the way how artists have dealt with the “nature around us” from the Early Modern period to the present day. We hope you will enjoy the experience of the artists’ gaze firsthand and the transformation of the viewer’s perception as you are guided by Yamamoto’s work.
Hiroki Yamamoto
Born in Chiba in , is Lecturer at Kanazawa College of Art in Japan. Yamamoto graduated in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo in 2010 and completed his MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), London in 2013. In 2018, he received a PhD from the University of the Arts London. From 2013 until 2018, he worked at Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) as a postgraduate research fellow. After working at Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, South Korea as a research fellow and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the School of Design as a postdoctoral fellow, he was Assistant Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts until 2020. His single-authored publications are The History of Contemporary Art: Euro-America, Japan, and Transnational (Chuo Koron Sha, 2019) and Art of the Post-Anthropocene (Bijutsu Shuppan sha, 2022). His co-authored publications include Media and Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Thinking about Racism (Kyowakoku, 2021), and Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia: Space, Place, and Community in Action (Vernon Press, 2022).
The “New Art History” trend in art history, which gained momentum mainly in the 1980s Euro-America, was influenced by the development of (post)structuralism and feminism, and reconfigured the established discourse of art history that had been taken for granted. Although there have been some criticisms levied against this trend, it has done much to pluralize the narratives of art history by challenging the normative narrative that had been considered universal, objective, and self-evident. The New Art History movement teaches us that art historical narratives are always open to the possibility of alternative ways of being.
The artists in this exhibition, including Kumagai Morikazu, Tokuoka Shinsen, and Kataoka Tamako, not to mention Kanō Hōgai, Urakami Gyokudō, Kitayama Kangan, seem to have already become “art historical figures.” However, when the works of these artists are juxtaposed with those by Ogawa Machiko, Honda Takeshi, and Hasegawa Yuki, contemporary artists from different generations and backgrounds who are still alive today, what kind of new art historical narratives will emerge? This exhibition will attempt to do so by setting the central axis of “representations of nature” that differ in diverse ways.
1st Exhibition of Bara-kai Group. Osaka: Osaka Namba Takashimaya Department Store, 1962.
Selected Works of Kumagai Morikazu. Tokyo: Nikkei Inc., 1974.
Kumagai Morikazu Catalogue Raisonné: Oil Painting. Tokyo: Kyuryudo Art Publishing, 2004.
16th Exhibition of Seiryū-kai Group. Tokyo: Kensodō, 1964.
Selected Works of Tokuoka Shinsen: Authoritative Edition. Tokyo: The Asahi Shimbun, 1993.
Posthumous Collection of Hōgai. Gahō-sha, 1902.
Posthumous Collection of Kano Hōgai. Seito-shobo, 1911.