Artist's Statement  1  2  3   4 | Exhibition

In my World of Yugen project, I revisit historical facts behind yugen in the remaking of paper as an act of aesthetic creation, thereby offering a space in which to experience it vicariously as contemporary art. Appropriating withering, beautiful old paper and handwritten documents that were made more than one hundred years ago and boldly returning them to water, I attempt to evoke the feeling of yugen through my own techniques, while at the same time visualizing the rebirth of a past era.
An invention over 2000 years old, paper has supported civilization as an information medium. With the acceleration of the information age and the global spread of methods for paperless transmission of information today, the contemporary role of paper as an information medium has largely been substituted by new technologies. While the functional role of paper has diminished, the aesthetic role of paper as a spiritual medium is more apparent and has succeeded today in reemerging as an art media.

Moving beyond the functional aspects of remaking washi, my works treat the culture and voices of the people themselves who lived in past eras, and with reflection, elicit their re-formation in the present. In this way, old paper and documents, asleep for years and now at my side, secure a place along the axis of time for the perpetual life of art and serve as a signpost to the Japanese aesthetic world of yugen that transcends rationalism.

In the current age when the fate of humanity is tied to war on the environment, those people who wish to continue to coexist with nature are vocalizing their concern for the transience of the present in the dark portrayals of the near future. By encountering my works born of knowledge of the cultural past of washi and looking back upon the beauty and the harvest reaped from the splendor of nature and the laws of nature governed by the universe, it is my hope that the power for a brighter future is reaffirmed.

 

Kyoko Ibe
March 2008