The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct, as possible.

- Allan Kaprow

Yutaka Kikutake Gallery Kyobashi will be holding a group show featuring Shuta Hasunuma, Yang Bo, and Nanao Kobayashi from Friday, June 6th to Saturday, July 12th. Shuta Hasunuma is a musician whose practice rejects easy categorization. Yang Bo is a painter whose work focuses on the sense of distance regarding pop culture and the way such culture is received. Entitled HEAR HERE, this exhibition is primarily made up of video, photography, and installation work by Hasunuma that engages in the abstraction of musical systems and boundaries, as well as a new series of paintings by Yang that are thematically based on sound and the phrase “ambiguous territory.” During the exhibition, we are planning one-day performance by Hasunuma and Nanao Kobayashi, who makes music under the moniker FATHER. In conjunction with the opening of the show, the Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra will hold a performance on the plaza in front of the Toda Building in Kyobashi on Friday, June 6th.

Shuta Hasunuma was born in 1983 in Tokyo. He is a musician and an artist who, in addition to his work with the Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra formed in 2010 with fifteen members, creates and exhibits visual artwork as part of a wider effort to disrupt traditional systems of music. This exhibition will include Re-model (2016), a series of work that dismantles and reconstructs music-related media, as well as Change (since 2013), an ongoing project in which Hasunuma collects ambient sounds and location data from his daily field recordings and uses this information to search for images on Google, which he then selects and emails to multiple people. This exhibition will also include a 2013 video piece entitled World in our hand, a roughly ten-minute video work edited together from footage of inconsequential scenes from everyday life where the filming locations, Japan and Kenya, appear as subtitles to the piece. In a series of short cuts, the cameraperson (Hasunuma), can be seen making a circle with his fingers. Viewers of this work will notice that music plays while the subject of the video is inside of this circle, and stops when the circle is broken, allowing ambient sounds to return. The movements of the cameraperson’s fingers as they open and close evoke an imaginary boundary that defines what is inside and outside of music. The question that runs through Hasunuma’s entire practice can be seen in this humorous approach: What is music?

Yang Bo was born in Hubei, China in 1991, and moved with his family to Japan in 2001. He is a painter who approaches music-related ideas differently than Hasunuma. Yang’s unique compositions feature quotes taken from Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, and other musicians from the Sixties and Seventies, and juxtaposes them alongside everyday scenes such as roadsides, riverbanks, and interior spaces. In addition to several other new pieces, this show features a painting depicting a view of an airport as seen from an airplane before takeoff. Set against the in-between, unclassifiable space of the airport, the indistinct shape of another airplane can be seen waiting in the background of the painting. Yang’s paintings often use complementary colors such as red and green, and the muddy grays that result from the mixing of these colors frequently appears as well. The use of these colors in this painting helps to emphasize the uneasiness engendered by this ambiguous space. The painting depicts this airport in the midst of roaring, thunderous weather, so bad that we don’t know whether the planes will be able to take off or not. In the sky we can see the word KISS, written with jagged, lightning-bolt letters, that paradoxically seems to highlight the stillness emanating from the painting.

The title of this exhibition, HEAR HERE, resonates with the Allan Kaprow quote cited by Hasunuma. Kaprow was the founder and practitioner of “happenings,” a type of artwork that only occurs at a specific moment and location. As a musician, Hasunuma’s efforts to create an indistinct, in-between space resonates with Yang’s own painting compositions that traverse the realm of ambiguity, creating an exhibition space that can only be found in the here and now. The addition of Nanao Kobayashi, an artist who uses embroidery to create sculptures that evoke the compression of space and time, helps strengthen the thematic focus of this show.