ARTIST TALK
Aiko Tezuka
In conversation with Alexander Hofmann and Louisa Elderton*
Thursday 14 November 2019, 6:30 pm
The talk will be held in English.
*Alexander Hofmann studied East-Asian and European Art History as well as Japanology at the Universität Heidelberg and Japanese Language and Art History at the Universities of Waseda and Gakushūin in Tokyo. From 1999 until 2004 he worked as a research fellow for the Institute of East-Asian Art History at the University of Heidelberg, where he obtained a doctorate with his thesis on painting as a form of elocution in Japan from the 16th to 19th Century. Since the summer of 2004 he has been curator for Art from Japan at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin. In this function, he has organized several exhibitions on traditional and contemporary art from Japan, such as „Kunst aus Japan – die Sammlung John C. Weber, New York“ (2006), „Leiko Ikemura: Korekara oder die Heiterkeit des fragilen Seins“ (2012), „Tiger, Kraniche, schöne Frauen – Asiatische Kunst aus der Sammlung Klaus F. Naumann“ (2015). His interests are focussed on the questions of representation, the construction of beauty ideals as well as social, economic and institutional aspects of art in Japan.
*Louisa Elderton is a freelance writer, editor and critic living in Berlin, specialising in art and contemporary culture. She is the German correspondent for Flash Art and contributes to Frieze, Artforum, Mousse, Elephant, The New York Times, and many more. She is the former European correspondent for Modern Painters. Since 2016 she has been Project Editor of Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin’ series — and is currently managing Vitamin D3: New Perspectives in Drawing (2020). She too is the Managing Editor of Gropius Bau’s forthcoming Lee Mingwei exhibition catalogue (2020). As the Content Editor of Phaidon's Great Women Artists (2019), she commissioned the writing for the most extensive book of women artists ever published.
She was the Project Editor of Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art, published by Phaidon. This book is about contemporary artists who use threads and textiles as part of a wider multimedia practice, in which Aiko Tezuka was featured.
Aiko Tezuka's exhibition “Dear Oblivion – 親愛なる忘却へ” is the artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery’s space, and it features works created in collaboration with the Textile Lab at Textile Museum in Tilburg (the Netherlands), the Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI), Kawashima Selkon Textiles and Kyoritsu Women‘s University Museum.
Tezuka’s creative practice, though grounded in painting, has long found expression in intricate fabric installations and objects that explore themes related to the culture, industry, and history of the global textile enterprise. Processes of weaving and unweaving function to characterize both the artist‘s trademark aesthetic and her particular thematic preoccupations; as she articulates in her artist’s statement, she is “interested in loosening up such readymade narratives to unravel forgotten histories or discover new plotlines,” and in so doing “facilitate the reexamination of the subjective nature of time and the process of metamorphosis.” In “Dear Oblivion,” Tezuka further explores these ideas with a critical emphasis on the deconstruction, reexamination, and reconstruction of the relationships between past and present, Japan and Western Europe, and art and craft.
