2020 Inaugural Program [Autumn/Winter]Tsuyoshi Ozawa
All Return: “Come back in a hundred years’ time. After a hundred years you’ll understand.”

The internationally recognized contemporary artist Ozawa Tsuyoshi is known for numerous series of works, including Jizoing, in which Ozawa took photographs of handmade jizo (a guardian deity associated with travelers and children) in a variety of landscapes, and Museum of Soy Sauce Art, in which he used soy sauce to reproduce various masterpieces from Japanese art history. In recent years, Ozawa has undertaken The Return of… series, featuring globally active modern and contemporary figures. The works, comprised of paintings, videos, and music, contain a mixture of fact and fiction.

In this series, Ozawa has focused on Noguchi Hideyo, Foujita Tsuguharu, and Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin) among others. He researched his subjects by traveling to the places they visited, including Ghana, Indonesia, and India, and then created collaborative works with local artists. For this exhibition, Ozawa’s first large-scale solo show in the Tohoku region, the artist conceived of a new work in the series, which deals with S.T., a modern-day figure associated with Hirosaki. Along with this new piece, for which Ozawa enlisted the cooperation of Iranian sign artisans and musicians, the exhibition includes all five works in the series in a reconfigured form. By shedding light on largely unknown aspects of eminent historical figures, The Return of… series presents a comprehensive overview, which transcends cultural differences and space and time, encouraging us to reflect on the times we live in.

Held at the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, a facility that has been rejuvenated and “returned” as a museum some 100 years after it was built, the exhibition provides us with an opportunity to find points of contact between people from other places and ourselves, and by developing relationships, to image and create new perspectives in movement and social inateraction related to the outbreak of the coronavirus, we are inspired to think about the potential of cooperative undertakings and the state of communication as well as the form of artworks, and the links between people and the local area.

Guest Curator: MIKI Akiko