TARO NASU is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Takeharu Ogai from July 4.

Marking his first exhibition at the gallery since 2006, Ogai has conceived this presentation entirely around new works, with a focus on the photographic works he has been developing in recent years. By placing photographic works and three-dimensional works in close proximity, the exhibition attempts to interweave fiction and reality within the gallery space. It may be understood as an extension of Ogai’s long-standing practice of photographing dioramas in order to create another form of reality. In the exhibition space, monochrome photographs of mountains are displayed. At first glance, they appear to convey the grandeur of nature with effortless restraint. In fact, however, they are photographs taken by Ogai of small mounds of sand left behind on a beach. As if revealing the trick behind the images, jet-black trees colored with graphite are presented on pedestals as “sculptures.” Looking up, viewers encounter a ring-shaped three-dimensional work suspended from the ceiling, emitting an overwhelming dissonant sound. Made by connecting duct pipes, the work asserts a violent presence that seems to oppose the poetic quality of the photographs, introducing a faint sense of unease into the exhibition.

Since his debut in the 1990s, Ogai has consistently taken “places that exist nowhere” as his subject. At times, this has involved a search for ideal models of ideology or society; at other times, a yearning for spiritual liberation and tranquility, or an inquiry into the very concept of “beauty.” In his 2006 solo exhibition White Hall Gift Shop at TARO NASU Osaka, Ogai displayed “worthless things,” symbolized by mud balls, as “products,” developing sharp reflections on the relationship between value and price in art, questions of beauty and ugliness and aesthetic judgment, and the act of creation from the perspective of labor. For Ogai, incorporating such fantasy worlds as stage settings through which to speak about his works is not an escape from reality. Rather, it is a bold attempt to rediscover the real world. For him, fantasy has always functioned as a passage of the mind through which to expand imagination and critically, yet productively, reconsider familiar and established concepts. It also serves as a “mirror” that produces an effect of defamiliarization.

After an interval of twenty years, Ogai looks at and reconstructs the real world through the filter of fantasy. Just as a mirror always shows us an image reversed from reality, Ogai’s quiet monochrome works are not a direct reflection of a noisy real world overflowing with color. Yet to imagine that the truth of the real world might be hidden in the faint creaking sounds that become audible precisely because of the stillness of this fantasy world — perhaps that, too, is another form of fantasy.

Takeharu Ogai
Born in Chiba Prefecture in 1969. Lives and works in Tokyo. 
In 1997, Ogai began working as an artist unit with Ai Ogawa (born in Kumamoto Prefecture in 1971).
In 2001, he received the Excellence Award at the 1st Art Scholarship Contemporary Art Award, in both the Fumio Nanjo and Yuko Hasegawa sections.*

Major solo exhibitions include White Hole Gift Shop (TARO NASU OSAKA, Osaka, 2006); The Path to the Spring (Le Forum, Maison Hermès 8F, Tokyo, 2004); On the Path to the Spring (TARO NASU GALLERY, Tokyo, 2004); TARO NASU GALLERY (Tokyo, 2003); Art Scholarship 2001 Excellence Award Solo Exhibition (exhibit LIVE [laiv], Tokyo, 2002); TARO NASU GALLERY (Tokyo, 2001); and TARO NASU GALLERY (Tokyo, 2000), among others. Major group exhibitions include Strolling Through the Garden (Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, 2012); Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2007); COLLECTOR’S CHOICE: Collection 2 (Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, 2007); Gardens: Toward a Small Secret Garden(Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, 2006); Between Here and the Sky (Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, 2006); my cup of tea – Private Luxury (TARO NASU GALLERY, Tokyo, 2006); OFFICINA ASIA (Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, 2004); Emotional Site (Sagacho Exhibit Space, Tokyo, 2002); Sleep / Dream / Awakening (Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Chiba, 2002); Fancy Dance: Contemporary Japanese Art After 1990 (Artsonje Museum, Gyeongju / Artsonje Center, Seoul, 1999); This Year’s Resolutions (Gallery K, Tokyo, 1999); and NEW LIFE(Contemporary Art Factory, Tokyo, 1999), among others. Public collections include Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi. Publication: The Path to the Spring, Yamato Radiator Works and TARO NASU GALLERY, 2004.
* indicates activities under the artist unit name Takeharu Ogai & Ai Ogawa.

Imaginary Mirror　Takeharu Ogai

The time of the world slowly came to a halt.
A pause pierced through.
With the things I usually had to do now gone, I began tidying my room.
Fragments fallen on the floor.

An unfinished puzzle.
A half-drawn landscape of somewhere.
As if picking up a seashell and quietly holding it to my ear, I gathered them one by one and looked at them intently.
The thoughts I had been thinking then, and the memories surrounding them, began to sound.
By then, that place was no longer inside my house, but seemed to be inside my own head.
As I made my way deeper into the cavern-like space of my mind, I found myself tracing back to memories from my childhood.

Back then, when skin had not yet hardened into skin,
in the pale morning light, while everyone was still asleep,
I quietly slipped out from under my futon.
A clear stream, where the smooth sound of water drifted along the edge of the mountain.
Everything pierced my tender skin, stinging and raw.
Born into a place where no one was there, told nothing, and with no purpose, I walked on,
my feet caught by the water flowing down from deep in the mountains.

I gazed intently at everything.
It was the moment I first became aware of this world surrounding me.
Even now, that scene still clings faintly to somewhere inside me.
Because of it, I have never been able to fully accept this world that surrounds me,
and even now, I wander, my feet caught by something.
In order to reconcile? with this strange, difficult-to-accept world, I will begin drawing again,
reflected in an imaginary mirror.

When I emerged from the cavern, the world outside had regained its time.
But it was turning in the opposite direction.