ONLINE VIEWING ROOM

SILVER MIST FROM THE EMPTY POT

Teppei Kaneuji and Chihiro mori

Chihiro Mori & Teppei Kaneuji, TV Accidents (Purple Dream), 2019, Digital Collage, Dimensions Variable

Jane Lombard Gallery is delighted to introduce Silver Mist From The Empty Pot, a digital exhibition of individual and collaborative works by Kyoto-based artists Teppei Kaneuji and Chihiro Mori. The exhibition investigates the point where our conscious and subconscious experiences collide, connecting and disconnecting distant places, times, contexts, histories, and stories to create new tangible visual narratives, forms and folklore.

Now more than ever, we are bearing witness to our own familiar narratives adapting to new “normals”; a change that can be constricting to some, and liberating for others. There has never been a moment, in the history of the world, that was immune to instability and change. The terrain of our global social archive was built through collectivity, voluntary shifts in the perception of our surroundings, reflections on our past and reimaginations of our potential futures. Change can be chaotic, unpredictable and chain reactive, sparking both monumental and diminutive moments of transformation that not only shape our conscious reality, but create new platforms for our dream worlds to thrive and integrate with our waking lives in narratives of multiplicity. It is within this intersectional space that Kaneuji and Mori thrive, pulling their inspiration from not only the events that happened, but those that will happen, could have happened, or never happened at all; negotiating the complexities and uncertainties of everyday life.

The selection presents the viewer with a series of epilogues that visually narrate playful commentaries on societal overstimulation, occupancy, possession and consumption. Kaneuji’s work places graphic illustrations in dialogue with painterly color planes, raw material and unfinished texture. His piece Games, Dance, and the Constructions (unfinished plywood) #1, for instance, combines monumentalized or monolithic assemblages of crystals, spheres, stones and mirrors with objects of construction and innovation, such as screws, bolts, planks of wood and gears. The landscape is presided over by an alien spaceship, which holds atop an ever watchful eye; a nod to ancient mythologies, and gestures of the unknown. Mori’s experimentations in drawing and painting provide a glimpse of digested images of memory and social collages through the lens of the artist’s gaze. Her work Horse’s Colour Photo, is a simple observation in high definition. Two figures, similar in size and stature, carry an empty frame through an empty plane, balanced in suspended physical engagement and visual application, depicting the relationship between material consumption and manual labor; a portrait of the workhorse.

Their collaborations materialize as oversaturated, glitchy digital compositions that splice subconscious meanderings with moments from television, cartoons and commercial branding. Their work TV Accidents (Light of Water) presents us with a textured collage of building facades, restaurant booths, telephones, washing machines, food and multi-lingual text, centered around a swirling bucket of shimmering water flanked with sparks of light and cradled with an outstretched hand. The resulting image is complex, with a rich visual topography of interlocking contexts and narratives that prompt the viewer to linger, occupy, consume, digest and regurgitate the work through their own gaze. 

At its core, Silver Mist From the Empty Pot presents as a platform for investigating the potential of a self-perpetuating and ever-evolving archive that sits at the confluence of conscious observation and subconscious hallucination; a space where assemblages of the past, present and future are born.

Teppei Kaneuji
Games, Dance, and the Constructions (unfinished plywood) #1, 2015
Screen print, unfinished plywood, aluminum structure
31 x 23 x 1.5 in, 78.7 x 58.4 x 3.8 cm
USD $3,500.00

Chihiro Mori
Figure of Half Human, 2010
Sumi, acrylic and pencil on paper mounted on wood panel
55 x 42 in, 140 x 107 cm
USD $7,592.00

Chihiro Mori
Denouement (The group worship) #Yellow, 2018
Acrylic and pencil on paper mounted on wood panel
38.625 x 55.125 x 1 in, 98 x 140 cm
USD $11,340.00

Teppei Kaneuji
ZONES (House) #3, 2019
Oil paint, lenticular poster, reflective sticker on wood panel
27.56 x 27.56 in, 70 x 70 cm.
USD $6,500.00

Chihiro Mori & Teppei Kaneuji
TV Accidents (Light of Water), 2020
Digital Collage
Dimensions Variable
USD $1,424.00

Chihiro Mori
Horse’s Color Photo, 2003
Ink and colored paper on paper
7 x 9 in, 18 x 23 cm.
USD $2,847.00

Teppei Kaneuji
ZONES (Block) #2, 2019
wood panel, lenticular poster, reflective sticker
15.75 x 15.75 x 19.69 in, 40 x 40 x 50 cm
USD $7,000.00

Chihiro Mori & Teppei Kaneuji
TV Accidents (Purple Dream), 2019
Digital Collage
Dimensions Variable
USD $1,424.00

Chihiro Mori
Five rings fortune-telling, 2014
Acrylic and pencil on paper mounted on wood panel
29.13 x 45.28 in, 74 x 115 cm.
USD $9,490.00

Teppei Kaneuji
White Discharge (Built-up Objects #37), 2014
Wood, plastic, Steel, resin
31 x 19.29 x 15 inches 78.7 x 49 x 38.1 cm
USD $12,000.00

Teppei Kaneuji (b. 1978) lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. Kaneuji earned a graduate degree in sculpture at Kyoto City University of the Arts in 2003. His work investigates the mass consumption of contemporary Japanese culture, sourcing materials from everyday life, found objects and manga characters to create sculpture that is at once playful and menacing. Kaneuji grafts together the detritus of overconsumption, creating candy-colored sculptures and prints with Manga-influenced lines that are the product of the overly stimulating, image-saturated culture in which he was raised. His signature series, White Discharge, (2002 onwards), consists of architectonic constructions assembling action figures, plastic food, and other small objects, covered with goopy white resin. Static yet dynamic in form, the unlikely allure of these bricolage entities lies in their embodiment of estranged elements; be they physical or psychological, attributes are layered, rationalized and given a new life through complex arrangements. Kaneuji has exhibited at the Art Front Gallery, Tokyo, JP;  Eslite Gallery, Taiwan, CN; Gallery αM, Tokyo, JP; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, JP; Jane Lombard Gallery, Chelsea, NY; Kyotographie International Photography Festival, Kyoto, JP; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, JP; Kyoto and the International Manga Museum, Kyoto, JP; Marugame Geniciro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, JP; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP; Museum of Art, Seoul National University, Seoul, KR; National Museum of Singapore, SG;  National Museum of Art, Osaka, JP; NYU Skirball, New York, NY; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, AU; ShugoArts, Tokyo, Japan; Singapore Tyler Print Institute, SG; Star Gallery, Beijing, CN; Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, JP; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, CN and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, JP.

Chihiro Mori (b. 1978) earned a graduate degree in painting at Kyoto City University of the Arts in 2005, lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. She has been making countless drawings as if she disgorges images of various visual memories that accumulate in the urban body, such as logotypes of companies, products and sports teams, or scenes from movies, to turn them into paintings by recomposing them as a collage. Doodles from her childhood when she was seeing the world in high-resolution, and a feel for their playful associations, have also been an important signpost for her journey of creation. By using Japanese washi paper which absorbs paint easily, or by creating semi-transparent pictures with layered glue, she experiments with different materials and plays with images in tangible forms, and its process itself represents the motivation for her to create paintings. Besides, it should not be overlooked that the artist’s gaze contains objection, which stems from a sense of alienation, to the social norms prompted by images flooding the urban areas, and to the “mainstream” supported by the majority. Mori’s work has been exhibited at Blum and Poe, Tokyo, JP; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Kurumaya Museum of Art, Oyama City, JP; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP; The Museum of Architecture, Wroclaw, PL; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo JP; National Museum of Art, Osaka, JP; Okinawa Art Museum, Okinawa, JP; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, JP; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Aichi, JP and Whistle, Korea, alongside a host of additional international group and solo exhibitions.