Bunpei Kado and Iku Harada will participate in ART SG in January 2023

Iku Harada and Bunpei Kado have been selected to exhibit in ART SG: Both artists have established themselves in Singapore.

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Iku Harada

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Iku Harada creates a 3D virtual space on the computer and nests it with the real world. Harada thought that everything in daily life has been depicted throughout history, and she wanted to create something that fulfilled these three elements: something that no one had depicted before, something that would continue to be depicted in the future, and something that could be developed by the artist herself. As a result, she came up with the idea of creating her own world through computer graphics, which she called "inner world. In the early stages of her career, Harada's style was simply to physicalize the virtual space by painting its simple 3D form on canvas, but over the past 20 years, she has made numerous attempts to develop this style into a painting motif that is unique in the world. In addition to materializing the virtual reality space, she has also developed her works to reflect the spatial motifs of the real world in the virtual space, making the viewer move back and forth between the two worlds.

Iku Harada 《GARDEN-NEO SG #001》2022 acrylic paint on canvas 1940x3240mm

Harada's digital world expands with each new project. Harada's latest project is Gardens by the Bay, a botanical garden in Singapore, where the silhouette of a supertree, an artificial tree that stands in a forest, is visible and hidden. The buildings and trees intersect to show a cross-section of the complex landscape.
The trunks of giant cactus trees also add to the exotic atmosphere, and the transparent walls and painted-in spaces appear in yet another two-dimensional work. Even the supertree made of reinforced concrete, its materiality reduced to simple shapes and colors, functions as a single piece in the composition of Harada's world.

《GARDEN -NEO SG #002》2022 acrylic paint on canvas　1455 x 1455mm

《GARDEN -NEO SG #003》2022 　acrylic paint on canvas　1455 x 1455mm

Singapore is a city where various cultures such as Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Arabic are mixed together, and each area is divided into different areas, making it an enjoyable place to stroll around. Geometric patterns symbolized by Pranacan and Islamic cultures are everywhere, inviting the viewer's eye to the landscape that spreads out behind them. This is the latest work, which is also designed to interact with the local people.

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Bunpei Kado

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Kado will return to Singapore after having participated in Art Stage Singapore in 2013, and after having established a track record at various overseas fairs. He will be reexamining one of his long-standing themes, nature in the city, or artificial nature. Singapore has long been an urban center, and as evidenced by the government-led plan to establish a botanical garden, the question of how to preserve nature and how to deal with development has been a longstanding issue in the country.

Bunpei Kado《Tree Kit 2022 (large) 》 2022　iron, sponge, wood, resin etc
1800 x 1200 x 30mm

Bunpei Kado's works lightly propose such heavy social issues.
Even a toy tree kit, if enlarged in scale, poses problems of a different dimension.

Bunpei Kado《O2》2016 Oxygen mask, acrylic, material for maquette　680 x 460 x 1800mm

Created in 2016, this work conveys the message that we literally breathe the oxygen produced by trees, and that our lives would not be possible without the cycles of nature. The work seems to foresee the era in which oxygen masks and other devices will be the focus of even more attention in the corona.

Other works to be exhibited include "Detached Condominium," which focuses on the theme of residential life. According to French art critic Cleria Zernick, Kado's art is "light."

Zernick comments on work of Kado as follows:
With Bunpei Kado, the world is suspended, in the double sense of suspense : it is at the same time suspended, in levitation, it has lost its gravity and its seriousness to be only a poetic evocation out of ground; and paradoxically, in a game of weight and balance, one measures all the more its fragility, its precariousness. The world is in suspense, that is to say in danger, threatened, its equilibrium is precarious, and its announced fall is looming.

The art of connection and collage, which at the same time poeticizes the world and puts it into question, properly speaking, makes it an enigma, is obviously political and critical. Recall that the ambition of the surrealists was to "transform the world", to "change life", by linking in an indissociable way - without ever wanting to confuse them - the poetic revolution and the political revolution. Using the dialectic between aesthetics and politics, the incrustation and the heterogeneous become a new optical instrument to see the world: just as the microscope serves to see the infinitely small invisible to the naked eye, just as the telescope allows to see the infinitely distant also invisible, the false-connection, the collage, the association between the lightness and the gravity, the humor and the seriousness used by Bunpei Kado reveal the invisible inconsistencies and absurdities of our contemporary world.

We hope that work of Harada and Kado will make your mind fly out of everyday life.

ART SG General Information
●Date: January 12-15, 2023
●Venue: Marina Bay Sands + Convention Center
●URL:https://artsg.com/
●Inquiries: Art Front Gallery : contact@artfrontgallery.com