PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Emiko Kasahara (笠原恵実子)
b. 1963 in Tokyo, Japan; based in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
www.emikokasahara.com

Works in exhibition
TSR 14, 2015
Installation with aluminum, brass, copper, nickel, and photographs

K1001K, 2015
Installation with 1001 porcelains and inkjet printing on 1001 sheets of A4-sized paper
* The last K in the title is intended to be rotated horizontally to face backwards.

See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157654535501224

After earning an MFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo, Emiko Kasahara was based in New York City from 1995 to 2014. She has shown work in major international exhibitions and group shows around the world, including Art in Japan Today 1985–1995 (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 1995), Yokohama Triennale 2001, and the 14th Biennale of Sydney (2004). Working with materials that are simultaneously inorganic and evocative of feminine textures, such as marble, silicone, and synthetic hair, Kasahara creates works that capture the world with a sober yet sensitive eye. In 2000, she began the project Offering, in which she visited Christian churches in 85 countries throughout the world and photographed offertory boxes, and has ultimately taken shape as an installation of these photographs and her sculptures based on them. The installation has been shown at the Folk Life Museum (Graz, Austria, 2005) and Yokohama Triennale 2014. For over 10 years, Kasahara has carefully documented her research and visualized the process of making objects that emerged from it, which ultimately resulted in a group of photographic and sculptural works. Attempting to collect, display, and engage in acts that might alter artifacts rooted in Western systems and dualistic thought, she explores the potential of various interpretations and propositions that arise from this sustained practice.
At Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, Kasahara presents a work that draws inspiration from the “Imperial crown style” architecture of the prewar Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and from ceramic hand-grenades produced in Japan during World War II, and another that deals with the themes of transborder of modernization. At the Museum of Kyoto, the cinema program Trigonometry will address the historical background behind this work in a different fashion, screening films selected by Kasahara from wartime Japan and Manchuria, and Soviet films.

• Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art