ART SHODO -The Calligraphy as an Evolving Art Movement Saturday, March 26 - Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Gallery NOW is pleased to present the exhibition “ART SHODO: Calligraphy as an Evolving Art Movement” from March 26 (Sat) to April 6 (Wed), 2022.

Calligraphy, like photography and crafts, has recently been breaking down the boundaries of genres and gaining recognition as an “artistic expression” and “contemporary art” alongside painting and sculpture.
In 2016, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa held a major retrospective exhibition of
Yu-ichi Inoue (1916-1985), whose strong will and brush strokes had an overwhelming impact on the world as he sought to make calligraphy known as an artistic expression.
The lineage of Inoue and other avant-garde calligraphers of the postwar period has been steadily passed on to contemporary artists, who, while shattering the aesthetic conventions and stereotypes of calligraphy, have been expressing the significance of “being calligraphy” to themselves and to the art scene.
This exhibition introduces new works by four artists who create “unreadable calligraphy” or “unreadable calligraphy” that dares to deprive the viewer of legibility and decodability.

Ayako Someya, who has extracted the meaning and reading of letters to the point where they are unrecognizable, reaches down to the “element” of the object to be written, and reveals its existence through the blotting of the ink.
Goo Nakayama, who has been seeking to depict the moment when letters are born by using primitive pictures and symbols like hieroglyphs, has been experimentally trying to break the composition of “paper vs. writer” with works such as “DIRT BOX,” in which he walks as a letter himself in recent years.
Lintalow Hashiguchi, who has replaced his brush with a towel, is inspired by Yu-ichi Inoue’s idea that “calligraphy is an art for all people,” and creates powerful calligraphy that symbolizes the cries of modern people as “energy to live everyday life. The book is inspired by Yuichi Inoue’s idea of “the book is art for all.
On the other hand, Taigo Watanabe’s work, titled “Here once was 00,” in which he writes on paper the timelessness of resetting the past and moving forward by erasing and hiding letters once written, stirs the imagination of the viewer through the presence of letters that cannot be clearly read.

The letters are at the root of the “calligraphy” that everyone envisions. However, there is room in calligraphy as a contemporary art form to create new values by shaking and overturning that concept. Unreadable calligraphy, so to speak, is a book that celebrates the unknown possibilities of the unforeseeable.
Please come and see the proof of the progress of contemporary calligraphy in the three years since the exhibition “ART SHODO NOW – New Developments in Calligraphy” was held at our gallery in December 2018.

Exhibiting artists
Ayako Someya, Goo Nakayama, Lintalow Hashiguchi Hashiguchi, Taigo Watanabe