For the first iteration of Art Collaboration Kyoto, Blum & Poe is pleased to present a selection of paintings by Yukie Ishikawa, Kazumi Nakamura, and Zhu Jinshi. This project is installed as part of a collaborative booth with Tokyo-based gallery ANOMALY.

For this presentation, Yukie Ishikawa shares work from her ongoing series entitled Impermanence, in which she alters the pictorial structure of paintings from previous decades, retouching or reworking compositions that had once seemed complete. No longer facing a blank canvas, she responds to the “given conditions” of the existing painted surface, adding new layers of lines and grids, some with sand mixed into the paint, to create layers of texture and depth that divert the eye across the surface of the canvas—a rejection of the perspectival focal points typically found in Western painting.

In two new paintings, Kazumi Nakamura continues his Broken Hermitage series, focusing on the aftereffects of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (1995) and the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011). Jagged, thickly applied lines vibrate and spiral around in the canvas creating a disoriented sense of depth, indicative of the physical and psychological instability caused by a natural disaster.

Zhu Jinshi’s new and recent works on view underscore the monumentality and physicality of his abundant impasto paintings.  His recent body of small format works which he began in late 2019 carries the same substantiality as his large-scale installations, but marks a notable return to a period of more focused introspection in his cycle of artmaking.

With work from Beijing, Tokyo, and rural Saitama Prefecture, this presentation underlines the global nature of Blum & Poe’s programming.