The Story Teller – Il narratore, immagine della performance, Art City, Bologna 26 gennaio 2013The Story Teller – Il narratore, immagine della performance, Art City, Bologna 26 gennaio 2013
Tokyo Monogatari
March 2013 – May 2013
Carlotta Pesce is pleased to announce the inauguration of the personal exhibition of the Japanese artist Yumi Karasumaru Tokyo Monogatari.
After the success of the performances in Bologna, acclaimed by both the public and critics, held at the deconsecrated church of Saint Mattia, during the Art Fair, in the setting of ART City, Yumi Karasumaru presents a new series of paintings produced especially for her personal exhibition at the Studio Carlotta Pesce.
Since the beginning of the Nineties Yumi Karasumaru’s research has developed pictorial images and performances in parallel, in an intense cultural investigation of the relationship between the present and the past of her country of origin, Japan.
In the paintings, as in the performances, the artist explores the history and spirit of a people suspended between tradition and the future; she analyses the crisis of a society whose customs have been modernised and westernised, causing deep trauma and unbearable lacerations , reflected in a surprisingly high number of suicides and murders.
In the performances, which combine Japanese theatre with western recital, as well as in the pictorial works, the memory of traditional Japanese painting coexists with Nipponese pop culture, with particular reference to Manga and Anime (Japanese cartoon) characters.
Her paintings are created from photographic images, often taken by the artist herself, in which family portraits, teenagers in the street in the quarters of Tokyo where young people hang out such as Shibuya, Harajyuku, Ginza interchange with urban views of Tokyo. Since the mid-Nineties she has painted a series of pictures about the horrors of Hiroshima e Nagasaki.
Each painting is the result of slow, patient and meticulous work. The artist uses a very personal pictorial technique, projecting the photographic images onto the canvas in order to accurately trace the outlines of the colours and then fill them with layers of unreal colours which simulate the effect of digital images, concealing the artist’s strong emotional involvement.
Yumi Karasumaru’s new project summarises the principal themes that have characterised her career over the last few years: personal and collective memories, historical and everyday events, which focus on an existential reflection on the of strain of living, the difficulty of each individual, even the smallest, to respond to society’s expectations. Even the title Tokyo Monogatari (traditional Japanese literary genre connected to oral narration) evokes the artist’s willingness to show and tell “stories that fluctuate between the past and present, true and false stories, black and white stories” that she has collected throughout her life.
Yumi Karasumaru was born in Osaka, she lives and works in Bologna and Kawanishi, Japan.
Since the early Nineties she has taken part in important international expositions from Europe to the United States to Japan.