MAKI Gallery is pleased to present Mirror World, Japanese artist Asami Kiyokawa’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, at Tennoz I, Tokyo. This presentation showcases the most recent developments in Kiyokawa’s eclectic practice, encompassing a wide range of media from UV prints to embroidered photographs and books, an art form with which the artist has worked for a long time. The title of the exhibition refers to the virtual realm, which the artist interprets as an “alternate city” built using new technologies like metaverses and digital twins. By highlighting the intricate relationship between the real and virtual worlds, the exhibition delves deep into how our identities in the contemporary age have become increasingly multifarious and complex.

Mirror World, a work with the same title as the exhibition, depicts what the artist calls a “virtual city where death does not exist” and posits the idea of “freely reconfiguring our identities and contexts so we can be born anew as something completely different.” Its blurred images eschew any clear boundary with reality and appear like a utopia behind a haze. Confronted with this dream of immortality, the greatest desire of humankind, the viewer is unable to ignore the work as a hypothetical and is drawn to face it head-on, consequently becoming more and more immersed in its spell. The fluid identity of the modern individual incorporates the “surface” created in the virtual world and undergoes an endless metamorphosis inwards and outwards, growing increasingly complicated as it dreams of an eternity that continues to exist beyond its physical form.

Feature image credit: Asami Kiyokawa, We’re looking for something, 2022, mixed media, 180.7 x 131.7 cm, Photo: Munetaka Tokuyama

Information

Start: Feb 23rd 2023 at 12:00am

End: Mar 31st 2023 at 11:59pm

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