FAR EAST - VOLUME I

Yu Hirai, Yumi Karasumaru
Opening: September 24, 2004  6 p.m. - 9 p.m.

September 24 - November 20, 2004

Agenzia04 is to open on September 24th the first in a series of exhibitions and events which together will make up the wide-ranging Far East project dedicated to young Asian artists.
The exhibition, which will develop through various showings from autumn 2004 onwards, opens with the two Japanese artists Yu Hirai and Yumi Karasumaru, and will involve artists from Japan, China and Korea.
The project's objective is to highlight the ever-increasing artistic presence of the East in the new panorama of world art. Western artists are becoming more and more aware of how their Far Eastern counterparts have freed themselves from the foundations of Western art and, although basing themselves on concepts and methodologies now belonging to the entire planet, are able to express their own particular philosophies in a manner both original and modern.
We will therefore map out a panorama taking into consideration the inevitable links of interchange and reciprocal influence between artistic endeavour in both parts of the globe.
Yu Hirai and Yumi Karasumaru have for some years now been marked out as presences on the international art scene as photographers, painters and performance artists. They have recently participated in European exhibitions confirming their place amongst the representatives of artistic innovation in Japan.
agenzia04, the new space for contemporary art, with this project continues in its aim of staging exhibitions giving collectors both from Bologna and all of Italy the opportunity to become acquainted with growing talents increasingly in demand on the international market.

YU HIRAI
With a sort of colour reportage of her existence, Yu Hirai fixes in images the experience of a live lived between Japan and several European countries (Belgium, Spain, Germany, France) in which, however, a spatial vision of reality is cancelled out in favour of a standardization of the world. Her reflections on what is important in human life pass through banal and everyday events, the experience of her living abroad, and her story finishes by constructing the universal theme of comprehending the contemporary world.
Her works oscillates between two worlds: the everyday and the fantastic, inside and outside of reality. The situations created in her photographic work, between fiction and autobiography, immerse us in an uncertain and transitory space. And this tension is reinforced by a chromatic duality: red and blue oppose external space, distant and often disquieting, with the artist's interior world, more familiar and reassuring.
The images in Yu Hirai's photographs are not portraits but become as icons, every featureless face can become ours and define our relationship with the world.
Yu Hirai was born in Tokyo in 1963. From 1983 she has lived in Europe. From 1985 to 1989 she lived in Belgium, frequenting the Ecole Supérieure de Beaux Arts La Cambre in Brussels, training in design. From 1990 to 1993 she lived in Barcelona, and from 1994 to 1999 in Berlin, where she began to work with photography. From 2000 to 2001 she lived in Dublin, and in 2002 moved to Paris, where she currently lives.
She has held various shows, both individual and collective, in Europe, including Next Generation / Art Contemporaine d’Asie at the Galerie Passage de Retz in Paris and in Japan, including The Future of Paintings at the Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Future Recollections at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and Mysterious Visitors from the Land of Ephémère at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier of Paris. She has participated in international art fairs such as Art Basel and the FIAC of Paris.
She has won scholarships associated with such important institutions as the Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris and the Irish Museum of Modern Art of Dublin. Her work is included in important public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

YUMI KARASUMARU
The intriguing work of this artist unfolds in a range of artistic media including painting, photography and performance, tracing in all its forms a sort of dialogue between past and present. Her work's fascination comes from its capacity to filter the atmosphere or cancel the differences between the dramatic facts of war and Japanese headlines, her childhood and familiar collective memories.
The artist, having lived for some years in Italy, succeeds, through the filter of her country and culture as seen from abroad, in individuating new potentials from stereotypical images.
The scenes portrayed in her series of paintings dedicated to the family establish a powerful link with the artist's past and cultrure, but everything is rendered evanescent and conflicting by the almost impalpable colouring overlaying it all. The particular rarefied painting technique and the pastel shading tending to white bring to mind old family photos, the dimmed portraits of another era stuck in the dimension of memory.
In the picture cycle of modern Tokyo teenagers, portraits playful with colour, recording a metropolis glittering with emotions, Yumi Karasumaru offers us a new and unexpected Japan, one caught between its roots in age-old tradition and unimagined technological development.
Her reflections on the future of contemporary culture trace a path continually searching for both her own identity and that of Japan collectively.
Yumi Karasumaru was born in Osaka. She studied at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts and at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna. She divides her time between Bologna and Kawanishi.
She has held various shows, both individual and collective, in Italy, including Officina Asia at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna, Tutto l’odio del mondo at the Palazzo dell’Arengario in Milan, the Venice Biennial, and Aperto '95-Out of Order at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna. She has also exhibited in Japan and the USA, including Toki No Fuin at the Hiroshima Prefectual Art Museum, Sister Corner at the Kyoto International Community House, and Facing History at the Marcel Scheiner Gallery of Hilton Head Island. She has participated in international art fairs such as ArteFiera of Bologna, Miart of Milan, Artissima of Turin and Arco of Madrid.
Her work is included in important public collections including the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna and the Museo d’Arte Moderna of the Republic of San Marino. She has won the Special Award at the Ermanno Casoli International Prize for Art, 2004 edition.

The artists will be present at the opening

For further information please contact Giulia Allegri +39 333 3781246 gallegri@agenzia04.com

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