【Video】Ken Asahina Exhibition［Art born from love of reading］｜Odawara Station East Exit Library

　This is a blog that introduces contemporary artworks that can be hung in your home, in the hope of conveying the joy of incorporating art into your daily life.

I hope that by getting to know the artworks and artists, you will be able to encounter a special piece of art for yourself.

In this video, I introduce “Ken Asahina Exhibition [Art born from love of reading] “.

Video of the exhibition held from January 13 (Sat) to January 28 (Sun), 2024

Venue：Odawara Station East Exit Library

Enjoy the exhibition in video

【展覧会動画｜Exhibition video】朝比奈賢展読書愛から生まれたアート｜Ken Asahina Exhibition Art born from the love of reading

When you are at a crossroads or stuck in life, I want you to read a book. Through books, you will always meet irreplaceable people with whom you can communicate heart to heart. This is because there are always people who have experienced the same problems as us in the past, and they have left their stories in writing. In this exhibition, I will be working on the theme of books that have supported my life.
Quote from the exhibition DM

In this exhibition, the artist attempted to visually express scenes from the stories, not only from his imagination but also from his own experiences.

For example, to depict the sunrise, the artist climbed a mountain in the early morning when it was still dark, and sketched the brightening of the sky from a place where he could see 360 views, thereby imbuing his body with the scene.

The process involved bringing the actual scene he saw and the image of the story scene closer together on paper, and then expanding them.

It is thought that “memory sketching,” which is his life’s work, was deeply involved in the background of this kind of production.

For more information on “memory sketching,” please refer to “From one of a contemporary art studio No.8” below.

But there was a preliminary step before he got there. It is not enough to read the text until it permeates the body. He had to read it aloud and transcribe it. It was necessary to imbibe the text by using all the senses available.

The work he created in this way, one by one, took only about three hours of production time to put paint on paper. This was because transparent watercolor was a race against time.

He used thick, water-absorbed paper (Arches paper) and controlled the application of the watercolor by taking advantage of the different movement of the pigments. He finished it before it dried.