Yuhei Saito is a painter. Born in 1982 in Niigata, Japan, used to painting in his childhood, and now based in Tokyo, he keeps producing paintings with unchangeable enthusiasm. Since his first solo exhibition "Counting Breeding" at an empty locker in Tokyo Polytechnic University, Saito has released his works in galleries and also extraordinary settings such as a telophone booth or a vacant shop, carried out various experiments using self-made books as the media, participated in art collectives OPAOPA, Night TV and Kkikimimi, or organized group shows or live painting events with his friend painters.

Surprisingly "MYAKURAKU" at Island Medium from 26 January, 2012, almost 10 years since his first solo show, is his first "solo exhibition in a white cube" despite his diverse and energetic activities of the decade. Indeed his activities obviously differ from ordinary painters who would place their paintings in a quiet gallery space. In his live-painting and one-day exhibition series "Kankestusen," for instance, Saito looks like a convivial session musician enjoying improvisation rather than a painter with a stern face. He also appropriates certain functions in the urban fabric by dropping his works in places like garbage dumps or books in secondhand bookstores, which suggests graffiti-like maneuverability to make interventions into the spatial politics. With their active engagement with people and the space through conflict and dialogue, those forms of his expression themselves may provoke diverse discussions and interpretations.

All the more for those experiences, the vacant space "white-cube" might appear rather challenging. The answer he worked out was to hold an ordinary painting exhibition by taking the given white room not as a neutral "anything goes" space as widely accepted, but as a very limited space only for works. It might be an unexpected conclusion for Saito himself. Then the the exhibition title was changed from animistic "Wood Horse X and Stone Cow Y" to bold "MYAKURAKU [ROOTS]" to show the roots interweaving his manifold activities, and Saito produced brand new works exploiting all the ideas and techniques he acquired throughout his career. In recognizing and manifesting himself as a painter again, he seems to have rediscovered the gallery space and immediately taken its advantage. In this sense, "MYAKURAKU" can be seen as if being the first solo exhibition of the painter Yuhei Saito after a decade of preparation.

Once his works come to the foreground in this way, it becomes difficult to find other words to describe Saito than just saying the painter. He does not try to justify or easily identify his works with any keywords or strategies, just following the drive to sense, capture and figure out images in his mind. Produced through the play with the materials, most of his works just portrait what he conceived in his daily life, without any strict themes or criteria, almost always swinging between purely visual sensation and somewhat figurative signification. It appears expressive and compositional at the same time, full of experiment and originality in techniques, and very playful at dealing with the concrete and the abstract ambiguously. However, if one would ask Saito about the meaning, he would answer "nothing like that." If one would ask about the skill, he would possibly answer "nothing like that" either. And if one would expect passion out there, he would evade the answer very likely.

But, if one would ask about the value, Saito must answer "Yes." Saito has lived as a painter only in this most simple and challenging way, that is, just painting. Still, the enthusiasm is not to try appealing genius or innocence to others, but to reveal the desire of a selfish and straightforward painter. While the artworld in Japan is underestimating the painting in its pursuit of the awkward language game of unfair competition and unjust education, Saito with his unchangeable enthusiasm will keep greedily fulfilling his desire and tirelessly exploiting the possibility of the painting. "MYAKURAKU" is, say, a place where first time in his career, Yuhei Saito directly confronts the painting and the white-cube as the nonsense and self-righteous expression and space, with himself as the painter being nonsense and self-righteous as they are. For now, nobody knows what would start here, what it would archive eventually and how it would be remembered in that future.

22 January 2012

*In this exhibition I dare try "an ordinary painting exhibition in a white cube" of which I had never had the opportunity in my activity. Such an ordinary exhibition would always have an introduction by somebody else. To follow the tradition in this exhibition as well, I asked him him to write an essay, with a brief request to "explain how this exhibition is related (or unrelated) to my past activities" only, and I made no censorship in the essay except obvious mistakes. (Saito)

[INTERVIEW]

Interview with Yuhei SAITO｜KALONSNET
Published: December 24 2010

[EXHIBITION]

Solo Exhibition『MYAKURAKU』
2012/01/26 - 02/19
@island MEDIUM (Tokyo、Kanda)

island MEDIUM