DISCURSIVE DIGRESSION - YOTARO NIWA

Opening Reception Saturday 9 April 2011

6.30 - 9.00pm

10 April - 19 May 2011

2P Contemporary Art Gallery

Shop 5, G/F, 6-20 Po Tuck Street

Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong

This April, Yotoro Niwa will research and create new works for the exhibition Discursive Digression. His work draws on his experiences as an artist working far from his home country, and considers ways in which unfamiliar environments affect our perceptions. During his residency and for his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Niwa will investigate how displacement and dislocation can be reframed within a new paradigm.

The exhibition will comprise site-specific installations incorporating maquettes made by the artist in his Berlin studio as the point of departure and materials sourced locally to create what Niwa describes as “fictive islands” intended to destabilize the viewer’s perceptions and awareness of scale.  Faced with the decay and deterioration of materials and the anticipated obsolescence of our current ‘state-of-the-art’ technologies, Discursive Digression also addresses the physical impermanence of the work of art and focuses as much upon the methodology of the production process as upon the artwork itself.  Each work will refer to its own process and to its anticipated life-cycle, encompassing the procurement of materials, transportation, installation, dismantling, restoration and conservation of the work.  

Yotaro Niwa was born in Hyogo, Japan in 1973 and completed his Masters degree in Fine Art and Sculpture at the Mushashino Art University, Tokyo before studying Sculpture and Interdisciplinary Art at Hochschule fur Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig, Germany.  He has exhibited his work extensively including at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon Korea, Art Space Kimura, Tokyo, HBK Braunschweig/Herzon Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Kunstverein, Hannover. In January –February last year Niwa was artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and will be taking part in the upcoming annual Spring Exhibition at the Charlottenborg Fonden/Kunsthal, Copenhagen.