We proudly announce the launch of solo exhibitions of Masaharu Sato;

digital animation work show "Toride Elegy" from 26th [Sat] November, and digital painting show "Little girl Coco" from 7th [Sat] January.

Masaharu Sato (born in Oita prefecture, 1973) graduated from oi l painting course, faculty of fine arts, Tokyo University of the Arts and completed a master's degree at the same university. In 2000 he moved his basement to Germany, and afterward has been creating works in Toride city in Ibaraki prefecture since 2010.

As apparent as his winning of the Okamoto Taro memorial award for contemporary art and exhibiting at "No Mans Land" (The old office of French embassy, Tokyo) in 2009, his works have been highly evaluated. He is recognized for his talent and collect e xpectations for future career not only within Japan but worldwide that his works have been displayed a t international exhibitions such as Di-stances (Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei) and City net Asia 2009 (Seoul museum of art).

Sato utilizes extraordinary techniques and manners to create hi s works. First he takes pictures and enters the data into a computer. After tracing the photography data, he puts undercoating just like the preparation process of oil painting, and draw s with pen-tablet in the same way of applying oil painting over and over. Deleting the photography data at the end, it leaves only the layer he draws with a pen-tablet. Being created through such wa y, Sato's works are given peculiar air which doesn't belong to neither photography nor painting.

Sato's digital animations are made by piling up several paintings ( still images) created through this process.
Toride elegy will exhibit 5 animation works, and at Little girl Coco we are going to show painting works that depict a model of 2 years old girl from his neighborhood.

[ More artist info: Masaharu Sato ]

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Elegies: Resurrecting Dreams, Madness, and Unseen Presences

Masaharu Sato creates digital animation and digital paintings with analog methods. He highlights problems lurking in the background of contemporary society by portraying everyday scenes of cities or nearby suburbs and rural areas in a slightly distorted or enigmatic fashion. He takes his subject matter from the area where he lives, but it has a contemporary relevance that resonates with things that are happening in cities and on their periphery throughout the world.

For example, in representative early animations like Traum (2004-2007) and the digital paintings made since around 2008, he depicts odd or occult urban experiences based on his own dreams. Unseen presences residing in both reality and dreams are made to slide back and forth between both worlds, bringing them to the surface and allowing them to be revealed. In Calling (2009-2010), cell phones and regular phones in various places in the city keep ringing because there is no one there to answer them. These phones suggest the existence of a network between callers and receivers of calls, showing the nature of the contemporary city as a network or system filled with the ubiquitous entities produced by the advance of telecommunications technology. In Avatar 11 (2009), life-size portraits of eleven people appear against a variety of background scenes, always looking over their shoulder at the viewer. They point up the issue of virtual identity, determined solely by the background or information provided on the internet.

Bind Drive (2010-2011) is a piece that appears in the present exhibition, "Toride Elegy." It shows rain falling in the suburbs to the sound of Kizuna (Bond), an Enka (popular ballad) about the love of a married couple. A variety of landscapes around the city of Toride in Ibaraki prefecture, where Sato lives, are picked out and presented with a cool, detached point of view. No people can be seen in any of the scenes until the final one, where an angel (female) and a devil (male) appear in a car parked in the middle of a rice paddy. They sing along with the words of Kizuna coming from the car radio, confirming their devotion with such lines as, "Don't leave me." and "I would never leave you." In today's Japan it is impossible to see rain without thinking about radiation, and as it falls we wonder where this impossible bond, this absurd relationship, is going.

Sato's new work shows landscapes based on Toride, but he composes a kind of story that could exist in any suburban area. By inserting human feeling into these landscapes, he tries to transform them into the scenery of a narrative. The new pieces show a connection to the absurd reality of Bind Drive, but they probably also reflect the mental landscape of the artist since the great earthquake of March 11. In Elegy Series: Sakura, a woman wearing a blue sweatshirt stands on a street in a suburban residential area amidst falling cherry blossoms, facing a traffic mirror and waving her hand. The fact that the image seems enigmatic and produces a sense of anxiety may have something to do with our own psychology. Thus, Sato's recent work is infused with human feeling, but he opens it up to the imaginations of viewers so that they can continue the story. The image is on a loop, making it stand on its own like a painting at whatever instant it is seen. It is probably set up this way to enable the viewer to observe and ponder the scene with greater freedom.

Sato's work often contains elements of inscrutability, discomfort, or friction. Functioning like a slight crack in an "image of perfect everyday life," it radiates out to the "raw reality" that we viewers believe to be actual reality. Dreams, madness, and unseen presences have been repressed and lost their place in contemporary society because of the control exerted by the modern system; their return in artistic expression, like ghosts coming back to life, is the most likely reason for the air of inscrutability and anxiety in Sato's work. This is how Sato experiences the phenomenon of urbanization, which will keep expanding throughout the world, from the inside and at the same time expresses it in the form of an elegy, giving us an opportunity to reconsider those things that have been lost – dreams, madness, and unseen presences.


Reiko Tsubaki, Assistant Curator, Mori Art Museum

Tsubaki received a master's degree in Theory of Creative Arts from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies and a DEA(master's degree) in contemporary art criticism from the philosophy department of Paris-1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and served an internship at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. In 2002, she became assistant curator at the Mori Art Museum, where she curated "MAM Project 007: Saskia Olde Wolbers" and "MAM Project 011: Jules de Balincourt." At present, she is working on "MAM Project 016: Ho Tzu Nyen."