Tokyo Gendai 2023

At Tokyo Gendai 2023, Shibunkaku will introduce two contemporary artists currently active in Asia: Jane Lee and Honda Takeshi. Lee is an artist based in tropical Singapore, and Honda works in his home and studio in Tono, a mountainous town in northern Tohoku. While both Lee and Honda are nearly the same generation, their dramatically different locales have likely contributed to their divergent visual styles and choice of materials. These artists share a kindred spirit of sincerity through both process and expression, and work to evoke the intrinsic qualities of their chosen materials.
 
Jane Lee subverts traditional notions of painting and imbues her works with a sense of playful physicality, calling attention to their inherent essence and materiality. The tactile and layered qualities of her works further emphasize their notable objectness, standing somewhere between painting and sculpture. Each work possesses a charm that invites dialogue between color, depth, and the beauty of process.
 
Honda Takeshi is known for his immersive charcoal pencil drawings of cedar forests and emotive oil paintings that vividly portray familiar subjects such as flowers and vegetables. Through a meticulous process of recreating black and white photographs taken whilst walking through the mountains and forests of Tono, Honda uniquely expresses accumulation of time and dissolution of ego into acetic inaction in these powerful charcoal works. Honda’s oil paintings on the other hand, bring emotions to the forefront, complementing his stoic charcoal works, and ultimately maintaining balance between these different approaches.
 
In this exhibition, we will showcase Jane Lee’s early representative works, including Fetish P8 (2009), and Honda Takeshi’s large-scale charcoal masterpiece, Walking in the Mountains – March (1994), as well as more recent oil paintings from 2023. This combination of works will create a space filled with pure beauty and a strong sense of earnest vitality.