Pearl Lam Galleries
Opening: Sunday, May 11 4-6 pm
Dates: May 12 – August 23, 2014
Address: 181 Middle Jiangxi Road, G/F, Shanghai
Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to present Sayaka Ishizuka: Life Threads, the emerging Japanese artist’s first solo exhibition in China and outside Japan, featuring 11 new pieces especially created for the show. Works will include a site-specific installation, for which the artist is most known, as well as mixed media on canvas, collages consisting of various coloured chopsticks mounted on wooden boards, a collage created from rice on an acrylic light box, and a new video.
Sayaka Ishizuka’s works explore the interconnectedness of humankind, focusing on the stories of everyday objects and those who use them. In Japanese traditions, inanimate objects contain traces of the holders’ spirit, as well as their personal emotions and memories. The artist takes common overlooked items in daily life as her materials, such as grains of rice, broken plates or bowls, worn-out kimonos, photos of cherry blossoms and household items, which are often connected with threads and suspended in the space of her site-specific installation works, Ishizuka tacitly transforms these mundane objects into simple yet profound spatial configurations, in which she believes the objects’ lives are linked and woven together into the ‘thread’ of human life. In Japanese, the exhibition title literally means ‘connecting lives together’.
Sayaka Ishizuka, “Genetic,” Wooden boards, chopsticks, 453×45×4.5cm, 2014
Sayaka Ishizuka’s works explore the interconnectedness of humankind, focusing on the stories of everyday objects and those who use them. In Japanese traditions, inanimate objects contain traces of the holders’ spirit, as well as their personal emotions and memories. The artist takes common overlooked items in daily life as her materials, such as grains of rice, broken plates or bowls, worn-out kimonos, photos of cherry blossoms and household items, which are often connected with threads and suspended in the space of her site-specific installation works, Ishizuka tacitly transforms these mundane objects into simple yet profound spatial configurations, in which she believes the objects’ lives are linked and woven together into the ‘thread’ of human life. In Japanese, the exhibition title literally means ‘connecting lives together’
Sayaka Ishizuka, “Waiting #1,” Rice, thread, old bobbings, five pieces, each 9×9×13 cm, 2014
Rice Deity (2014), a walk-in installation newly produced for this exhibition encompassing a third of the gallery space, consists of 4,200 handmade strings of rice grains hung from the ceiling, as well as used utensils and an old table collected from antique markets in Shanghai. Ishizuka spent 18 months developing the work, which was first conceived for a 2009 project in Echigo-Tsumari, an area known for its top quality rice production in Japan, and exhibited in an old deserted Japanese house. The artist immersed herself in researching rice production, living and working with rice farmers for six months. She views rice as the seeds of life, representing warmth, nourishment and sustenance, with the threads of rice symbolising the link between the past and the present in an infinite chain of life.
