Lightbox Space opens on October 27, 2011 with the Italian first exhibition by Japanese artist Ken Matsubara.
Sometimes meeting someone is the result of a concatenation of causes and effects which seem to suggest us that, after all, everything has already be written.
When we first met Ken Matsubara in Volta, during Art Basel in June, his work seemed perfect to us to represent the journey that Lightbox decided to start in its own space in Venice. Ken was excited about our invitation and he immediately began to prepare the exhibition.
Ken Matsubara is well-known in Japan and the U.S. for his work fed by images related to the many faces of both personal and collective memories.
The photographs and video clips used in his installations seem to resurface from a recent past or a familiar remembrance, emerging from an old garret full of memories.
Ken revitalizes these images in his works, making them an active part in the building of a present time. His installations stand out and never leave us indifferent, because they touch the strings of our collective
unconscious.
In this very special year for Japan, struck by the recent tsunami, the memory faces that emerge from water, specifically made for Lightbox in Vietnam, take on even more emotive and emotional sense and lyrically tie themselves with the inexorable fate of Venice.
The sense of vertigo of a world on the brink of apocalypse creates a deep disorientation. Therefore, memory plays a fundamental role.
The story of our origins helps us to find our place in the world. The images of past concur to slowly focus a possible present identity; they guide us in this effort, after identifying and then connecting the
dots of a dematerialized world.
Ken Matsubara’s boxes carry both the loss and the rediscovery of a “Self” in constant search of its sense. Many moving images, such as the smoke clouds in the series Winter Dream - Cloud, appear as excerpts from a world of dreams. Dreams are also other traces of our history, echoes of other lives lived by fragments of ourselves.
Therefore, in Ken Matsubara’s works we can find tracks to try to make sense of the fate of the world, of the History that unites all people on Earth who are united by a common fate, under the same sky, flooded by the same waves.
Mara Sartore
Venice, September 28, 2011
If you are interested in the exhibition catalogue, please download your copy at this link: "Ken at Lightbox catalogue"