Kounosuke Kawakami / Pia Borg / Tom Leighton

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contiguous zone "Virtual Records" 

YOD Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition, contiguous zone, Virtual Records, that will be held from October 6 to 24 October.

Contiguous Zone is an annual exhibition to present contemporary British art in Japan. Taking the format of a group show it brings diverse artists’ practice into a dialogue. The series takes its title from the ‘contiguous zone’ of a country’s territorial waters, suggesting the increasingly diffused boundaries of both Japan and the UK today, island countries now connected to a global network of information. However, the series seeks to transcend discussion of boundaries and socio-political notions of territory, giving instead space to breath and to be taken to new ideas.

The first show in the series is titled Virtual Records showcasing works by Kounosuke Kawakami, Pia Borg and Tom Leighton. The works presented here represent an aesthetic inquiry into the state of landscape, time and space. 

Kounosuke Kawakami (Born in Yamanashi, 1979) uses a traditional method of painting: layered collages of man-made and natural material purposefully obfuscate the perfect resemblance of the work to his researched references. His practice stems from a fascination with Modernist architecture and his memories of childhood, haunted by a timeless, anti-commemorative quality.

Pia Borg (Born in Melbourne, 1977) uses video as a medium, informed by German Expressionist and utilising traditional animation techniques. Shunning the slickness of digitised animation, Borg expresses a preference for a timeless aesthetic in the creation of a space between the past and the present. Moody and evocative, her animations are imbued with a European sensibility and the subject is enigmatic. 

Tom Leighton (Born in London, 1981) uses photography in his works. His images appear to be of existing places but are instead imaginary utopian cityscapes. Familiar cities are deconstructed and retranslated disregarding the constraints of physical possibilities, akin to memory. They aim to capture at once the beauty and paranoia within mass culture, the crowd and the architecture that houses this.

Please find a difference in the development of artscenes between UK and Japan and feel a new trend from UK in those various mediums, such as painting, video and photograph, in this exhibition. We hope that our space, as ‘contiguous zone’ of a country’s territorial waters, will be a place to exchange cultures between East and West and a part of the dawn of the new era like a lot of cultural exchanges took place in the age of Great Navigation.