New Artist Picks
Yokohama Museum of Art has been organizing “New Artist Picks (NAP),” an annual exhibition held at the art gallery and Café Ogurayama that showcases young artists with promising careers ahead. For this year’s installment, the exhibition will be featuring works by artist Yu Araki.
Araki was born in Yamagata prefecture in 1985. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in sculpture in 2007, he completed the master’s program at the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. Araki has traveled extensively to various locations in Asia and the West including South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, France, Spain, and Iceland. Based on the local history and culinary culture that he encountered during his visits, Araki has created videos which bring together historical fact and his personal past.
The exhibition will be presenting a new video installation by the artist which explores the theme of “authenticity,” taking as its subject the Parthenon which exists both in America’s southern regional city of Nashville and Greece’s capital Athens. Nashville, where Araki spent his adolescence, is known for its full-scale replica of the Parthenon. Nashville’s Parthenon was built for the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897 under the influence of Neoclassicism that was, at the time, taking the Western world by storm. 100 years later, it became the venue for the exhibition in which Araki presented his work for the first time.
For Araki, Nashville is tied to his relationship with his American family which he lived with for an extended period and also his memories of discrimination and prejudice against Asians that he experienced during his self-forming years. Amidst facing challenges that could not easily be overcome, such as his struggles of adapting to a foreign culture and facing the limitations of language, Nashville was also the place where the artist rediscovered the possibilities of art. For this work, Araki will begin his journey from Nashville’s Parthenon and make his way to the original Greek temple in Athens with the question of what determines authenticity. Here, essential themes for the artist such as “original and reproduction,” “dissemination and mistranslation,” and “East and West” are woven together with the extensive history surrounding the Parthenon and presented as a single narrative.
A related exhibition at Café Ogurayama and an artist talk will be held in conjunction with the main exhibition during the program. We hope you take this opportunity to view the work of this emerging artist.
