KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of Atsushi Aizawa’s solo exhibition, No Man’s Land, on Saturday, August 12th.

NihongaAtushi Aizawa has been subliming the traditional aesthetics of (Japanese traditional painting, which use pigments deriving from natural ingredients such minerals, shells, corals, and many others) into latest contemporary expressions of media art, by featuring phenomena in the nature including rust, magnetism, and others. His academic background which crosses over both Nihonga and media art, has been enabling him to bring the hidden invisible elements in our nature to come to sight.

In this exhibition No Man’s Land, Aizawa describes the intermediate area between the nature and the human being, found in the everyday life that we live, which is a new approach one step forward from his past works, where phenomena in the nature had been simply and purely been put into figures.

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The title of this exhibition, No Man’s Land, means a land that is unoccupied or is under dispute between parties who leave it unoccupied due to fear or uncertainty. The term was originally used to define a contested territory or a dumping ground for refuse between fiefdoms. Nowadays, it is commonly associated with the World War I to describe the area of land between two enemy trench systems, which neither side wished to cross or seize due to fear of being attacked by the enemy in the process.

Aizawa describes the inspiration of the exhibition derived from the uncertainty of when he saw a net that was covering a slope of mud aside of a road. The slope, which is part of the nature, exists there because of human purposes of efficient living, which appeared to Aizawa as a symbolic status of ambiguity between natural and artificial. Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupér, renowned for his novel The Little Prince, described in Wind, Sand and Stars that humans can finally see themselves only by knowing more about the land throughout his tactful essay condensing fifteen years of experience as an aviator. Aizawa, who shows sympathy in this idea or Saint-Exupér, would make an homage to this novel in which was first published in France, back in 1939.