NADA Miami 2020

Emi Otaguro:

One of Emi Otaguro's representative artworks is a piece with “chewing gum”. Although the just-finished artwork has a faint mint fragrance and has fresh machine-pressed marks suggestive of mass production, the odor will fade away and the edge of the artwork will be rounded off as time elapses. Although the chewing gum which is "not swallowed although it is classified as a food" is not directly helpful in providing nourishment for our bodies in a time of disaster, etc., it remains in existence as a tool for providing "Ma (empty time)" for diversion in our busy everyday life. Therefore, the motifs of her artwork are people sunbathing in the park, or the people and animals that are in an ambiguous state between awaking and sleeping while they are relaxed and in the instinctive state of mind.

This photographic artwork was created by photographing a carved piece of gum placed on the back of a stray cat which happened to visit her studio. This is based on the unpredictable actions of a cat and a piece of chewing gum whose shape changes over the years. Also, the ceramic work is her new development.

Michi Suwa:

Although all the rivers flow into the ocean, the water in the sea never overflows. We are aware that the globe rotates, but we still feel the sun and stars are moving slowly when we look up at the sky. Are the world we know (believe to know) and the world we perceive really the same?

When we confront with the works of Michi Suwa, we feel a kind of new sense of oddness towards the world which we usually take for granted. Suwa tries to understand the real world through her sincere observation, contemplation of, and painting the things and phenomena around us. The abstracted landscape of phenomena and time that Suwa depicts stimulates the viewer's primitive but fundamental inquisitiveness.