YASUHIRO KASAMI

PEOPLEText: Satsuki Miyanishi

Based in Sapporo, artist Yasuhiro Kasami won the award of Tokyo Wonder Wall 2012 and is spreading his activity all over Japan. After the exhibition at Wonder Site Hongo in June, his solo exhibition “LIGHT-CONE AND OTHERS” will continue to CAI02, Sapporo. Just like his previous show, dynamic works and new pieces were introduced this time, and we succeeded in interviewing the artist about his expression and his vision.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

Could you tell us about the concept of this exhibition?

I am a painter and always paint in my atelier. There is nothing quite like a “concept”, but I named this exhibition “Light –Cone and Others”. Light cone is a map of time and space drafted with the speed of light. “The past incidents which affect now and the future incidents which are affected by now, both fit inside the light cone”, the words of this text are common in the painting which are supported by the light. A painting can be regarded as an incident, but at the same time, painting also has uncertainty, and thus I put “others” in the title.
Seeing seems to be restrained from a perspective viewpoint, and unseeing may be restrained from past incidents. Neither, yet either of those, the things which you accidentally could see, I paint while facing this kind of thinking. The body which is the prop of seeing and unseeing. I’m interested in the image of this.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

We could feel your will from your symbolic works. Where do your ideas come from?

The idea comes from where I live, where the painting has been standing up, interesting books, newspapers and so on. I believe the most important thing for the painter is painting. Finding the motivation and idea for the painting through the action and experience of painting is essential to me. As Kandinsky jumped into “infinite fog” and as Klee walked ahead step by step “following his heart,” I would like to dive off into the center of painting and paint with steps.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

You “try making appearance unseen existence between the world and myself and the construction measured by meta level, through the painting”. What is this like?

That is a construction which supports the images of what I recognize from the back side. It is an unseen construction which makes “that” exist.

Experiencing various things, we recognize the irreversibility. From this irreversibility with a certain huge discontinuity, the time I didn’t feel started to flow. The relationship of time and space is not the same, it is varied. The layers of this come out at one at a time and it makes me puzzled. Then I find out that what I have seen is just an incident which has only been explained with one perspective. When a relationship ends, a lot of unseen construction sticks out like unwrapped steel frames. With this kind of feeling, the big sign on top of a building jumped into my eyes and the figure of steel frames which support the enormous plane got closer to me, the construction of the sign make us think that there must be a certain construction at the rear of a recognizable image. And I wanted to make being unseen stand up with a strong will in the painting, and not make it an easy story. If the things suppressed by the present days compose our unconsciousness and bare new desires, pieces of pressed landscape, emotion, and internal unrecognizable demands will appear as déjà vu in the process of painting.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

How do you compose your work?

Like whipping myself I throw opposite color and line to my narcissistic and emotional color and shape. Complementary colors, speed of brush stroke, drawing and vanishing, usage of accident, usage of land and map…I give balance and fluidity to the images which were created to come out of the conscious. I compose the painting to stand up as a mysterious construction with a risky balance as a whole.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

Is there any impressive incident or any influentical thing to your activities?

Yes, there are many. Since I am kind of lowbrow and influenced by various things, looking at Dumas at the modern museum in 2006 or 2007, I became interested in painting. I had been painting with the theme “searching space of things which are neither memorized nor recorded” and using techniques of dotting and making blurred images. However after seeing Dumas, I thought I had to paint more spontaneously, I had to directly face the desire of painting rather than playing with the concept.

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© Yasuhiro Kasami

Lastly, could you tell us what you are planning for the future?

I would like to take on the challenge of canvases of varying sizes. I’m also interested in representational painting. I want to sense the world with my retinas.

Yasuhiro Kasami “LIGHT-CONE AND OTHERS”
Date: August 23rd – September 13th, 2013
Opening hours: 13:00 – 23:00
Place: CAI02
Address: B2F Showa bld. Odori West 5, Chuo-ku, Sapporo
Tel: 011-802-6438
http://www.cai-net.jp

Text: Satsuki Miyanishi
Translation: Fuyumi Saito

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