plus art co., ltd. (English: plus art co.,ltd; located in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; Representative: Taku Nitta), a company whose business centers on the theme of enjoying contemporary art, is pleased to announce "Born New Art Vol.3," featuring a total of 20 artists, to be held at +ART GALLERY on the 14th floor of Shibuya Scramble Square.
"Born New Art Vol.3" runs from Monday, March 27 to Sunday, April 23, 2023. To energize Japan's art scene, 20 talented young artists come together for this exhibition event to present their unique visions.
Now in its third edition, this annual project at +ART GALLERY on the 14th floor of Shibuya Scramble Square invites you to be captivated and inspired by works in which the artists challenge contemporary art from fresh perspectives, drawing on a diverse range of styles and media.
Unbound by traditional frameworks and pushing the limits of creativity, their bold and original works make this a must-see event for art lovers, collectors, and anyone looking to purchase art for the first time. Please join us in celebrating the future of Japanese art.
■ Three ways to enjoy Born New Art Vol.3 — and what makes it special
1. With a total of 20 artists rotating week by week over four weeks, you can discover new art and artists across a diverse range of styles and media.
2. Even first-time art buyers can enjoy art with ease, thanks to attentive advice from our staff.
* We offer guidance tailored to your home, taking into account the artist's career, the nature of the work, and more.
3. With artists present in the gallery to talk with you, you can hear directly about the thoughts and feelings behind each work.
* Please check each artist's social media or ours for the dates they will be present.
■ Participating Artists (in order of appearance)
相川恵子/大隈伸也/大塚孝太郎/木村美帆/西川美穂/cocoro/スズキシノブ/長縄拓哉/原ナビィ/廣瀬祥子/大越円香/飯島秀彦/いちにほ/少女 (SONYO) /山田ゆかり/ITOSHI SAKHRANI/丁子紅子/ナカミツキ/三輪瑛士/渡邉城大
Week 1: 西川美穂/大塚孝太郎/大隈伸也/相川恵子/木村美帆
西川美穂
Created the cover artwork for "Spark" (Hibana) and "Ningen," the Akutagawa Prize–winning works written by comedian Naoki Matayoshi. Working around the concept of "things seen and things unseen," I paint pictures that, by stirring and drawing on the viewer's own memories through the act of "seeing," transform into something different from—something previously unseen beyond—what is visible now.
大塚孝太郎
When lost in thought, there are moments when I forget the passing of time and simply drift, blankly. In those moments my field of vision stays unfocused and blurred, yet somehow it feels comforting. Through my work, I create in pursuit of a world that lies there—idle and ambiguous—freed from the very concept of time.
大隈伸也
"Fragmentation." Once broken apart within my own imagery and reconstructed, it transforms into something strangely singular. The fragmented image takes on ever more varied facets and poses its questions to the viewer. I create mainly around things close at hand, everyday scenes, and motifs from daily life.
相川恵子
The face we actually see is only a fraction; there exist unseen faces that even the person themselves does not know. My work is to bring into being the shape of a face that may or may not exist within you or within me. Not only the visible face, but the truth that there are unseen parts, and that it is complex. To recognize a face is close to drawing near to that truth. In contemplating an utter stranger, I believe it is important to think about the face.
For me, making art is creating forms never seen before. The face is what enters our field of view most often in daily life, and the act of breaking apart its predetermined parts is a kind of means to escape fixed images.
木村美帆
I paint cars and the extraordinary worlds that surround them. Scenes we might see in some future to come. Places that may already exist somewhere in this vast universe. I have expressed such a world through painting.
Week 2: 原ナビィ / 廣瀬祥子 / スズキシノブ / COCORO / 長縄拓哉
原ナビィ
Born in Tokyo in 2001.
I paint the things that lie at the root of humans and animals—"instinct and impulse." I often draw inspiration from manga, music, and the like. Lately I've been interested in "anger (do)."
廣瀬祥子
Graduated in 2018 from the Department of Painting (Oil Painting), Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. After working as a designer at a game company, she now works across the two fields of art and illustration.
She creates paintings using a technique of printing digitally produced data and then adding to it by hand with drawing materials. Under the name "Hirose," she is also active as an illustrator, having created illustrations for popular works including domestic and international games, light novels, and "Hatsune Miku."
スズキシノブ
Drawing on a career as a leather goods craftsman, since 2020 she has presented works using techniques such as leather carving. Under the concept of the word "escape," she expresses an attitude of overcoming. By considering how people relate to the precious leather that is a by-product—and by making it into lasting work rather than something disposable—she aims for one answer: an "escape" from the existing flow.
The fact that the nourishment indispensable to human life is other living things reminds us that we live in relation to other beings, and offers a clue to look at ourselves anew. That leads to rediscovering and re-recognizing oneself, and I believe that one's relationship with oneself, not only with something else, can become a daily source of nourishment.
Through the link between leather that changes and grows with age, and a self that matures and deepens through "escape" from a rigid "past," I reflect on gratitude for life.
COCORO
Surrounded by countless digital devices each day, always doing several things at once, our lives have come to resemble picture-in-picture. We gaze at images and videos on our phones while eating, listen to music while on the move, and email friends. Square screens are forever present around us. I feel that this very transformation of our way of life in a digital society reflects the era we now live in, and I paint that everyday reality.
長縄拓哉
Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1982, he is a dentist (Ph.D. in Medicine) and a contemporary artist. After graduating from Tokyo Dental College in 2007, he conducted research on orofacial pain (OFP)—intractable pain in the oral and facial region—at Tokyo Women's Medical University Hospital and at Aarhus University in Denmark, and developed a sensory testing device for the orofacial region. He received the Neuroscience Award at the IADR (Boston, 2015). He is currently enrolled in the Graduate School of Digital Hollywood University. Applying the characteristics of contemporary art, he aims to improve health literacy among people indifferent to medicine and health, and among children, to help prevent disease.
Week 3: 飯島秀彦/ 山田ゆかり / いちにほ / 少女 (SONYO) / 大越円香
飯島秀彦
A worn-out, tattered stuffed animal—unsettling and ungainly, yet somehow endearing. Desperate to hide its own weakness, it grows aggressive toward others.
山田ゆかり
Working around the concept "Find the sparkling moment in life," she creates paintings and poetry. Through abstract painting and creations that combine photography with painting, she expresses the "flutter of the heart" so easily forgotten amid daily life. Through her work, she hopes viewers will rediscover the happiness of being able to live each ordinary day, and reawaken the body and heart—and the joy—that tend to grow dull amid the runaway advance of modern technology. She is energetically active in Japan and abroad; her large-scale solo exhibition in Shanghai in 2019 was especially highly acclaimed. Her approach of treating the entire exhibition space as a work and staging it, under the theme of "enjoying art with all five senses," has also been well received.
いちにほ
I create with the image of tucking away into a toy box the things I have loved and that make my heart flutter—unchanged since childhood.
少女 (SONYO)
Born in 1999 in Seoul, South Korea. Graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Art and Design, Musashino Art University. Through exhibition activities based in Tokyo, she gives voice to her own thoughts on the sense of unease she feels within a contemporary society overflowing with all kinds of incidents and problems each day, and on femininity—expressed through her distinctive vivid palette centered on pink, and her own way of painting.
大越円香
Completed her studies at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in 2023. Graduated from Akita University of Art in 2020. Major exhibitions include the solo show "Invisible view" (KUNST ARZT, Kyoto, 2022), SHIBUYA STYLE vol.14–16 (Seibu Shibuya, Tokyo, 2020–2022), the solo show "Fractal ⇔ Fracture" (Akita University of Art Satellite Center, Akita City), and Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2020 (Gyoko Gallery, Tokyo, 2020).
Week 4: ナカミツキ / 三輪瑛士 / 渡邉城大 / ITOSHI SAKHRANI / 丁子紅子
ナカミツキ
Contemporary artist Nakamitsuki, inspired by a period of hospitalization with hemiplegia in her early teens, takes "music" as her motif and works under the themes of physicality and dialogue. Holding diverse values unbound by existing rules, and raised as a digital native, she creates with the everyday tool of her generation: the "iPhone." In her process, turning art into data lets it appear anywhere, yet once an image is made into a work, it is instantly deleted from the "iPhone's" data—a contemporary sense of speed that gives rise to a new form of art unlike any before. Naka concentrates her emotions in an instant and draws them out intuitively, but by materializing them into works, she shares her values with viewers and forms a dialogue. The momentary saturation and atmosphere expressed from music, and her smooth yet powerful lines, give the viewer a jolt of impulse.
三輪瑛士
Beginning from the aim of "painting what is seen exactly as it is seen," he now researches the pictorial expression of how visual information is received and processed, the act of observational depiction expanded by modern technology, and the "distance"—in its many senses—between the information that is the subject and the observer.
渡邉城大 / WATANABE Kunihiro a.k.a. JohDai
Born in Ehime Prefecture in 1983. After working as a manga artist's assistant, he creates paintings based on the techniques and concepts of Japanese manga, and photographs nature—mainly starry skies—through mountaineering.
ITOSHI SAKHRANI
Born in Tokyo in 1987, of mixed British, Indian, and Okinawan heritage, with a background of growing up in a borderless environment.
Concept
When I think about what expression that is truly my own means, the first thing that comes to mind is family, and next the environment in which I grew up. I believe the individual is formed by the DNA inherited from one's parents and by the influence of everything one has encountered from birth to the present, and that from this, our daily habits and scenes arise.
I think all of it is a succession of irreplaceable things, and in my work especially, I place importance on freely enjoying the process. By not being bound by (social standards of value), (things that are planned or carry meaning), or (feelings of superiority and inferiority), the things that form me appear naturally on the canvas as different colors and shapes. There, there is life; there is flesh and blood. Creating is a dialogue between the artist and the work, a kind of phenomenon in which both change one another. When you view it, please feel the work freely, in your own way.
丁子紅子
Born January 24, 1991, in Omiya, Saitama Prefecture.
Committee member of the Gendai Doga-kai / Graduated from the Art Course at Omiya Koryo High School / Graduated in 2023 from the Department of Painting, majoring in Japanese-style painting (Nihonga), at Joshibi University of Art and Design.
She presents Japanese-style paintings (Nihonga) mainly at department stores and galleries in Tokyo. Through book cover designs, CD jacket artwork, and collaborations with apparel and eyewear brands, she aims for activities that let people feel "Nihonga" close at hand in their everyday lives.
■ Event Overview
・Venue name: +ART GALLERY (14F Shibuya Scramble Square)
・Exhibition title: Born New Art Vol.3
・Dates: Monday, March 27 – Sunday, April 23, 2023; open 10:00 - 21:00
※ Business hours may change due to the impact of COVID-19. Please check our official website from time to time.
・Venue: Shibuya Scramble Square Shops & Restaurants 14F (150-0002 2-24-12 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
・Access: About 30 seconds to 1 minute from JR Shibuya Station (Yamanote Line, Shonan-Shinjuku Line), Tokyo Metro Shibuya Station (Fukutoshin, Hanzomon, and Ginza Lines), and Tokyu Shibuya Station (Toyoko and Den-en-toshi Lines)
・Admission: Free
・URL: https://pls-art-shop.com/
・Organizer: plus art co., ltd.
■ Sales Method
・In principle, sales are on a first-come, first-served basis; however, depending on the volume of advance inquiries, we may switch to sales by lottery. If you would like details, please contact us below.
Inquiries: ml@pls-art.com
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