News
Keisuke Yamaguchi @ Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
2019/08/03
Keisuke Yamaguchi’s “Backing forward” is held on Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
(also, he has been participating in the Related Exhibition of ART SETOUCHI @ DAIKANYAMA T-SITE anjin café)
■Keisuke Yamaguchi: Backing forward
June 8 - September 4, 2019
at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hirosima (1-1 Hijiyama koen Minami-ku Hiroshima-city Japan)
Artist Keisuke Yamaguchi (1962- ) first attracted attention when he debuted his oversize copperplates of arks in the late 1980’s. Since then he has created works in different forms, including not only print art and engravings, but also paintings and three-dimensional works, with motifs ranging from flowers and seeds to the heart and the entire human body.
Meanwhile, the artist began keeping a daily journal on March 14, 2011, three days after the Great East Japan Earthquake. He later named the journal After the Quake: Notes, and has never missed a single day of keeping it ever since. In the journal, the artist painstakingly transcribes daily news articles with information about nuclear power generation, expressing his will to move forward on his feet against the steady stream of reality.
“Humans cannot see the future; we can only see the past or the present moment. So it is as if we are moving forward with our back first,” Yamaguchi once remarked. Recently, he has been committed to making large-size paintings with overlapping human faces, achieving ever-stronger imagery. The artist inspires us to search for a way to continue moving forward despite carrying the weight of the past and its memories, which have made it difficult just to move in a straight line.
