Kouseki Ono: Transplants

Kouseki Ono is known for his flat artworks composed of small towers of ink, which are made of tiny dots with a diameter of few millimeter printed hundreds times on same point over and over with different layers of colors using a technique called screen-print. The tower of ink distinctively changes its color depending on the angles people see. A large flat artwork displayed on the floor of Shiseido Gallery’s “art-egg” exhibition in 2009 is typical work of this style. Though printmaking premises that numbers of same prints can be made out of one plate, in case of Ono, many different works can be created from one same plate. This is because his printed dots using different colors of ink never swells up in a same shape when it is printed hundred times on same point, becoming a tower of ink.
Working along with such flat artworks, Ono also began creating three-dimensional work using the tower of ink around at the same time when he started his flat works. The artist calls this series “transplants”. In this method, he scrapes off towers of ink from the original prints and transplants the tower to another surface to make different work of art. The first work created by this method was a series of works which he applied towers of ink to cicada’s shell attaching them with tweezers. In a sense, he converted from traditional medium, printmaking, to another direction in his flat works. However, his standpoint when he decided to work with “transplants” should have been something different. It must have been similar to the position of a painter who decided to make a sculpture. What Ono chose was to “attach” on the shell of cicada which he “discovered” by chance. Although we can now find it as his constant theme, what to “discover” should be very important. The works that combines hollow sign of life with trace of his work allows us various interpretations.
In addition, Ono started to apply “transplants” method by attaching tower of dots on flat canvas to create a completely new series of work. In this exhibition at Art Front Gallery, we would like to introduce new “transplants” series. It is interesting to see what he has “discovered” as his new material, and what kind of picture plane he has created using his tower dots.

Toshio Kondo / Art Front Gallery