Thinking with the Body:
Ways of Relating to the Body in Contemporary Art
The first Collection Exhibition in the year 2015 will present works of art related to the human body.
The human body has been perceived differently in different times and cultures. In an earlier era, human beings walked or used animals to move from one place to another, but technological advances have created many new modes of transportation that enable us to travel long distances at high speeds. The fantastic progress of telecommunications has made it possible to obtain information from faraway places without moving a step. The Internet is awash with huge quantities of information that were previously inaccessible. The virtual world produced by computer technology is expanding, and the way we perceive and think about our bodies is beginning to change. It is becoming more difficult today to get a substantial sense of the physical reality of our bodies. For this very reason, contemporary artists can make use of their bodies as they actually exist to read the spaces and worlds spreading out around them and communicate what they experience to others.
In this exhibition, we consider artistic expressions linked to the body in six sections. Two of the most interesting works by Japanese artists are the works from "An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo" series, in which MORIMURA Yasumasa, known for taking on the guise of figures in famous paintings, engages with the work of the Mexican female artist Frida KAHLO, and "Untitled – mother and baby –" by HIRANO Kaoru, who unravels the fibers of clothing and restructures them as installations. HIRANO’s installation was produced on site at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2008. Other Japanese artists represented in the exhibition include NARA Yoshitomo, ODANI Motohiko, IWASAKI Takahiro, KAWASHIMA Hideaki, and KANEUJI Teppei, and it also features art related to the body by such twentieth century masters as Pablo PICASSO, Salvador DALÍ, and Francis BACON. The paintings of ONO Yūzō, MISE Natsunosuke, NAKAMURA Kengo, and FUJII Kenji, who treat contemporary themes with techniques and ways of handling space taken from traditional Japanese painting, give viewers an opportunity to think about the relationship between the space depicted in the paintings and their own bodies. The photography gallery showcases expressions of the body by such twentieth century photographers as André KERTÉSZ, Edward WESTON, Jacques-André BOIFFARD, Hans BELLMER and Mario GIACOMELLI.
