Exhibition Dates
November 6 – 29, 2008



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Color / No Color

Onishi Gallery is proud to present five con­tem­po­rary Asian artists who work with the theme of “Color / No Color.” The uniquely Asian sense of color ­– seen in every­thing from fash­ion, food and lit­er­a­ture to inte­rior dec­o­ra­tion – is rooted in an appre­ci­a­tion of the four sea­sons. Color rep­re­sents feel­ings, mood, and atmos­phere; just as Asian peo­ple allow each season’s col­ors to per­me­ate their every­day life, the artists in “Color / No Color” explore the sub­tle nuances of color as a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their viewers.

The exhibit opens simul­ta­ne­ously with the Asian Con­tem­po­rary Art Fair (www.acafny.com), which runs from Novem­ber 6–10 at Pier 92. Natsu’s instal­la­tion piece “Water from Heaven” will be shown at the fair’s VIP lounge; Ayako Waka­hara will par­tic­i­pate in “Con­tem­po­rary Cal­lig­ra­phy from Mid­dle East­ern and East Asian Tra­di­tions” on Novem­ber 8 at 11:30 am at the fair.

Ai Camp­bell explores the intri­cacy of com­plex emo­tional reac­tions that often result from sim­ple human inter­ac­tions. She uses space to cre­ate haunt­ing forms in black and white draw­ings and paintings.

Akira Ike­zoe uses del­i­cate but vivid line draw­ings to cre­ate sym­bolic forms and pat­terns that explore space while con­vey­ing an unfor­get­table, gen­tle aes­thetic and har­mony. In this exhibit, he works with sub­tle color in paint­ings and prints.

Sungmi Lee’s draw­ings and paint­ings con­vey pri­mal forms that seem to vibrate in space, while her tex­tured sculp­tures, includ­ing her tree sculpture-installation piece, shown at New York’s PS1 in 2006, recre­ate the nat­ural world.

Natsu uses black and white (rather than col­or­ful) West­ern beads to exam­ine her sense of color and its rela­tion to Japan­ese cul­ture. In her sculp­ture “Music Nota­tion,” she strings, weaves, and knots a pat­tern of black and white beads. Her repet­i­tive, prim­i­tive process cre­ates a coher­ent com­po­si­tion that sym­bol­izes the rhythms of the universe.

Ayako Waka­hara merges cal­lig­ra­phy and paint­ing in vibrant com­po­si­tions. Work­ing at the bor­der of visual and tex­tual lan­guages, she con­sid­ers color essen­tial to her work, as she helps turn cal­lig­ra­phy into its own expan­sive art form.

Just as each cul­ture expe­ri­ences color dif­fer­ently, each artist in “Color / No Color” stretches our sense of color’s per­ma­nence and imper­ma­nence at any moment.

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