Yoichiro Kamei: Morphology/Cosmology - Artist Statement

The COVID-19 state of emergency became the catalyst for me to begin creating drawings. Since moving to Okinawa, I had relied on my workplace facilities for my daily creative space, and I never imagined a situation where I would be unable to access it. With restrictions on going out, I found myself spending unusual hours in my home space, and it was then that I suddenly thought, "Perhaps now is the time I could work on drawings."

I had always been fascinated by drawings. Tracing back the origins of this admiration, it began when I discovered Susumu Koshimizu's series of crayon drawings and Isamu Wakabayashi's masterful set of 18 pencil drawings depicting forest trees. Through these works, I felt I could understand the essence of sculptural expression, and I was overwhelmed by the artistic dignity that emanated from each sculptor's work.

Against the backdrop of these personal changes and aspirations, I began my drawing practice with two themes as its initial direction. One concerns "boundaries that divide interior and exterior," and the other deals with "the aspects of resulting internal spaces." These are the same themes I had contemplated in my porcelain work "Lattice Receptacle," and in this sense, these drawing works can be considered variations that attempt to express the same content I had been exploring in ceramics, but through a different form of expression.

Boundaries give space its vessel-like quality, while aspects narrate the characteristics of experienced space. In creating these works, I first focused on establishing more intricate "regular systems" than ever before. This was because I wanted to maintain a clear basic structure of accumulated identical units while incorporating elements of natural "fluctuation" that emerge on the surface. As a result, these elements overlapped in multiple layers, giving the forms an active quality, and gradually the works evolved into "images of forms transforming through division and fusion" and "images of phenomena emerging from distinctive laws and orders."

In this exhibition, I will present 13 new drawings centered around these two series of developments.

Kamei　Yoichiro
1974 Born in Kagawa Prefecture 　/2001 Grand Prix at the Asahi Ceramic Art Exhibition 　/2006 Completed doctoral program at Kyoto City University of Arts 　/2010 Received Kyoto City New Artist Award and Kagawa Prefecture Culture and Arts New Artist Award 　/2014 Exhibited at Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale (National Museum of Indonesia) 　/2016 Featured in Crafts Today at Kikuchi Kanjitsu Memorial Museum 　/2017 Exhibitions at Crosspoint (Kagawa Prefectural Museum) and Narrative Substance (Takamatsu City Museum of Art) 　/Present: Residing in Okinawa Prefecture