TAB Event - Ryoko Kato Exhibition

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At Unseal Contemporary
Media: Painting

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From her early period up until today, Ryoko Kato's works have presented a vision of a world that keeps becoming a less and less inhabitable place, but one in which we nonetheless will surmount and continue to make our way in - this has been the consistent message of her art. This message is voiced not in a loud, clamorous voice, but instead blends quietly into the background of all her other works. Kato's characters stubbornly continue spreading this message in various settings, especially the little girls with chimneys sticking out of their behinds...
Kato's recent works take as their motif the North Pole and polar bears in an effort to tackle issues of environmental pollution and lifeforms and organisms that may soon perish as a result. The characters in these works seem filled with a certain despair, but at the same time one can read a certain survivor's resolve to carry on living right until the end in their expressions. The title of the exhibition, "Kakame", is an archaic term for both mirror and snake - the mirror being a metaphor for Kato's vision of the world as seen through the mirror of her gaze. Kato sees a certain duality and pantheism in Japan's vernacular culture, symbolized by the god of mercury that is simultaneously a poison as well as a cure for it. This solo exhibition, Kato's first in two years, remixes contemporary and ancient conceptions of this dualistic notion of a mirror (and snake), mingling a sense of both hope and despair.

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