exhibition is now open

and today (as Im watching the football and the time difference is what it is) will be the opening party for the exhibition. I must say that Im extremely happy about the working results for the 2 months spent at Youkobo. The rest of the year will be extremely busy in terms of shows so now I will take two weeks off before the storm.

Also at Youkobo there is an opening of another artist Kenji Ide, who has made an impressive installation at the gallery. I think we deserve a great party later on! Please join us on facebook

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=102061543173170

and check more details on youkobo website. The weather seems to be very pleasant tomorrow so we will host a party outside with drinks and snacks!

http://www.youkobo.co.jp/en/

I just can't believe the difference of my studio. With the help of my Marie we managed to transform what had become a festival for leggy creatures like cockroaches into a really nice exhibition space.

sorry for being a bit slack

since I havent updated in a while. I have a general feeling this has not caused any pain for anyone. I hope there is at least few people who will read this blog. Anyways LOTS of things have been happening. I will perhaps try to add more images and text later. I am fully busy for my exhibition and this is the last working week in my studio now. Theres quite few new pieces that Im very excited about. I will add photos of them later after I have got professional photographer in here.

Souliya left for Laos and here he is giving a talk at youkobo. Jamie is translating and Tatsuhiko is listening.

We ended up singing karaoke after the party and a great meal.

Here is by far the biggest paper I have strethced, 240 x 153 cm. I needed Maries help to put it up and I was wondering if it is even possible to do but so far so good.

one....

two...

and three. Im going to crop the final image from the bottom. I wanted to see how the drips would behave on such a long paper and if there would be some new phenomenom that would happen. in this case (like usually) it didn't work like I thought.

humidity and wamth

Yesterday the humidity was 97% and I could not work at all. Al the papers felt wet and they were super bloated and curvy. Also since then nearly all of the tape I have for stretching paper has stuck into unusable blocks! Nevertheless, heres some images of last weeks work. There has been lots of other activities as well including a field trip to kamakura (we saw mount fuji!), meeting friends from finland and going to openings and buying sashimi knives.

im not sure if this is finished. have to see how it seems tomorrow in a daylight...

the last 'keijo' (one of the several train/metro companies) train from shibya to kichijoiji. i know how sardines feel now...

opening for the show by yuuri and chihiro kabata in shibya-area

kappabashi and sashimi knifes

mount fuji

and the sea!! so nice day this was.

after lunch...

dripping

Here's whats been up to in the past week or so...I had to re arrange the studio a bit to make room for more pictures. I do not want to roll them before i know what goes up on show (as the papers will be less cooperative after that).

this is a small cube from nice perspective with primary colours.

the same cube with 'the between colours'

This piece took me the most of the week. Its kind of reverse I have normally done and the cube got a little messy inside.

drips drips and more drips...to be continued

out & about pt3

Yesterday was a great field-trip day. We drove out of the city to visit sculptor Masaji Asaga and his Rock Museum in Kameoka. In Oulu where Im from the name would suggest something else but here it is 100% rock. Beautiful as well. He is running a residency program there as well for stone sculptors and has done workshops on how to make tools for rock sculpting.

It was nice to leave town fo a while...

Raccoon was a symbol for the region. Their mascot has a barrel of sake attached to him as well. Perhaps this is because they seem to produce a lot of rice here...

Masaji was a master of digging out bamboo shoots (just in season). We dug out a box of them. The plant is amazing. They are all connected underground like mushrooms and can grow a foot/day. New ones apparently popped out every day. Hiroko told me that somewhere they eat bamboo sashimi but you would need to dig those out before they spurt out of the ground (thats also illegal apparently?). There ones need to be boiled with seasoning but oh boy arent they good!

Heres the bamboo forest near the rock museum. You can see the shoots in the ground.

The catch! They really look like some monsters from miayzaki animation.

and this is the museum.

view outside

The main objective for this trip however was a retrospective exhibition of AY-O. Hes perhaps so far the most influential artist I have come across here in Japan. He was part of fluxus group in NYC in the 1960's and uses distictional rainbow colouring in his works. I had come across his work here and there but never in the scale as I was lucky to expereince here. He had done a lot of installation work and some really ambitious sculpture. The retrospective was held in Tsukuba Museum of Art, in the north of Tokyo.
Below is the artist AY-O who I was honoured to meet as he was signing his book for me. I gave him my cataloque as a gift. He has been down at Youkobo a few times as well. I would love to sit down with him and ask how was Duchamp in person etc. He is now 79 years old.

here's a sample of his work I found on the net.

and what would a good field trip day be without a nice lunch? ...mmm

its like finnish summer now

The newest watercolour cube has found its way and Im quite pleased with it. It has different dynamics than one similar cube I have done previously a few years back (also its a lot more complex!). I was never very happy how that one turned out (the coulours were a bit unbalanced and it had purplish overall hue). I am not totally happy with this one either but there is something that I enjoy about it so it will probably be exhibited somewhere.

here is another cube I have been meaning to try for quite a while now ( i think for more than 2 years or so...). It is done with ink and there's 3 layers of it in every dot. Many people prefer monochromatic works that I have done, personally I cannot say one is better than the other of the pieces I choose to exhibit.

last nite I had an idea and as usual the end result is quite far from the result. I might try this again some day but it will envolve bigger paper and at least 60 hues already mixed. (this one has 36)

these are the same colours but applied differently. I didnt correct the tones beforehand so theres a lot of variation on the overall hue of different tones.

leaves have grown as Ive been working

and this is my regular lunch place at nishiogikubo. pretty standard sushi but for the price its heaven if you like raw fish with vinegary rice (their rice tastes butelry somehow, I wonder how they do it) and green tea.

its been 4 weeks here now

and the studio is rocking it. Once it got drier and sunnier the work mode switched on full gear... I mixed 36 colours in the beginning of week, some are straight from the tube, some are mix of a few pigments. The difficulty is getting their tone accurate so when applied they should form as ambiguous colour as possible. Ive been doing this for few years but so far Ive never been truely happy.

here's the first layer. I used video beamer to project the image on paper

here's another one thats coming up. I think this one will take a while...

but heres the newest cube. This will be hung the other way around so it appears falling. The size is 150 x 120 cm. This took quite a while to do, I think I started this wednesday and finished it just now.

and a close-up. I like the randomness and 'mistakes' the process creates. It the brush versus gravity.