For Ginza Curator’s Room #003, curator Martin Germann has invited Belgian Kasper Bosmans (*1990, Lommel) to show his works for the first in Japan. The artist is widely celebrated for his unique artistic approach in reflecting on local myths, tradition, and vernacular culture. From its beginning, his work explores the contexts which are constituting “fine arts” as a discipline, which also refers to applied arts: those were – in the West – often considered as subordinated to “fine arts”. But exactly craftmanship and tradition is the infrastructure from which “fine arts” could develop at all.

Bosmans’ work can be therefore compared with that of an archaeologist, who digs for forgotten stories, tales, local myth, driven to a degree by the motivation to queer existing (art) history. This also attunes his work to the current age, in which the role of art is being sought into contexts of all kinds:

 anthropology, history, and in the wake of the urgent climate crisis also natural sciences and forgotten indigenous knowledges provide material by which to engage contemporary art as in instrument for revisions, new connections, and narratives for the future.

While the main working media of Bosmans comprises sculpture, drawing, installation, and painting, his work also plays with exhibition formats. In the framework of Ginza Curator’s Room #003, the ritualized format of the sales exhibition is taken as point of departure, which is this time focused, amongst other topics, on representations of carps – veritable cross-points of Chinese and Japanese art histories, in which the carp is a symbol of will and vitality, connected to countless myths and tales. “Beyond Fish” can be understood as a mobile exhibition which was woven in an animal-related sales exhibition at Shibunkaku Ginza space, and fully completed on site.

For Bosmans, art a ‘learning tool’, as he once said. He uses painting for example in a way in which others would use a notebook. This is particularly the case with his Legend paintings, a continuing series of small and easily transportable wooden panels he has been producing since 2013. Intentionally they were invented to replace explanatory texts next to artworks. The Legends are still executed in the size of the scanner Bosmans used back then, which makes us think of the many formats and algorithms of the digital age. Combining a broad spectrum of visual codes, from ancient family heraldry to contemporary technological sign languages, they weave as delightful notational line through Bosmans’ practice. On the one hand material and tactile, and on the other hand amateur- and even authorless-looking, they are capturing and mapping any possible field of research the artist is concerned with, and combines facts (and fictions) with visual information about rules from Western art histories.

The new works from Bosmans’ “Legend” series circumnavigate, amongst other things, practical issues around the conditions under which paintings with fishes were made. Because of the question of durability, the methods in painting sweet water or saltwater fish vary. To conservate a saltwater fish it was wrapped in moss on its way to the artist (before it was painted, and later eaten), whereas fishes living in sweet water had a way shorter durability. Those differences even led to genres such as sports-related still lives and kitchen still lives. Bosmans’paintings combine respective information along with particularities from Shibunkaku’s descriptions of Carp, produced by Chinese artist Fan Anren in the 13th century. Basically, the new works in Bosmans’ ongoing series are a nod to the fact that each tradition is based on simple rules related to feasibility.

Additionally, a set of glass sculptures, which are completed with materials sourced in Japan, are on display. These works lead directly to the area where Bosmans grew up: The so-called Kempense region, located in a sandy heathland on the border of Belgium and The Netherlands. Since ages it is known for illegal and clandestine activities and a preferred smuggler location. Especially over the 20th century the suburbanization of that landscape increased dramatically, so that wild animals had to search for ways to move through the landscape. They did so through so-called wolf corridors, almost invisible ecological infrastructures which were encouraging the free movement of wild animals. The glass sculptures show representations of the corridors, as well as the animals which are using them. In that respect the corridors can be also seen as metaphors for the practice of Kasper Bosmans as such, who, in each of his series searches for news ways to re-think and re-open existing histories, to enable social change.