Tokyo, Japan – WAITINGROOM is pleased to announce Rui MIZUKI Solo Exhibition, AZUMAKUDARI, which is the artist’s first solo exhibition at our gallery. MIZUKI has been creating work in the theme of relationship between urban space and human body, based on his particular physical sensation as a skateboarder. His work is made by dismantling and reconstructing the existing expressive method such as photography, painting, and sculpture. He creates paintings using deck tape for the skateboard and paint for road, rolled aluminum with the photography image directly printed on, and drawings with pen and swarovski on the flattened boxes for sneakers. It is MIZUKI’s own method to search the system in the city by continually assimilating and dis-assimilating, seen thorough skateboarding. The exhibition will consist of all new works in the title “AZUMAKUDARI” taken from the “Ise story”. This title refers to the geographical relationship between Kyoto where he lives and Tokyo where the gallery is located at, and also his own process of art making.

Left: C’s, installation view, RMIT PROJECT SPACE, Melbourne, 2017
Right: Mirror behind hole: Photography into Sculpture Vol.3 Rui MIZUKI, installation view, gallery αM, Tokyo, 2017

About the artist, Rui MIZUKI
Born in Kyoto in 1983, currently lives and works in Kyoto. Graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts, majoring in Japanese Lacquer in 2006 and obtained Ph.D. in the program of Media Art at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2016. His recent exhibitions include a group exhibition “Compilation of Activities” (TOKAS Hongo, Tokyo, 2018) “, solo exhibition “Mosaic of the City” (ARTZONE, Kyoto, 2018), solo exhibition “C’s” (RMIT PROJECT SPACE, Melbourne, 2017), solo exhibition “Mirror behind hole : Photography into Sculpture vol.3 Rui MIZUKI” (gallery αM, Tokyo, 2017), “NEO-EDEN” (Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum, Suzhou, China, 2016), group exhibition “STEP OUT! New Japanese Photographers” (IMA gallery, Tokyo, 2015), “PARASOPHIA Special Collaboration Exhibition – still moving” (Former Suujin Elementary School, Kyoto, 2015), group exhibition “NIPPON NOW Junge japanische Kunst und das Rheinland” (E.ON, Dusseldorf, Germany, 2014), two person show “flowing urbanity” (ART68, Cologne, Germany, 2013), group exhibition “View of Water : From Monet and Taikan to the Present” (Yokohama Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 2007?) and many others.

Left : Pool #Broad bean 04, 2016, chalk and deck tape on panel, 1000 x 803mm
Right : Untitled, 2017, chalk and deck tape on panel, 1450 x 1450 mm

Artist Statement
Under the urban environment after the modern period, rationalization and circulation was violently promoted for people, economy and resource, so that people’s behavioral pattern has been conventionalized to some extent. On the other hand, suburbs are situated outside of the city, so that there is a blank space in the meanings and space, I think there is something that makes people aggressive.
The title of this exhibition is derived from the Act Nine, “AZUMAKUDARI”, of “Ise Story”. It is not only a reference to the geological relationship between my living and working location, Kyoto, and the gallery’s location, Tokyo. It is also a reference to “A man (modeled as Narihira Ariwara)” who went away from MIYAKO (City as centralized environment) and met things for his creation outside of the city, and I felt the similar feeling to this man’s emotion through the process of making new works for the exhibition.
I have been getting ideas for my work from human agency and its environment in the city space, however, this time, I revolve my idea from several social landscapes I saw passing from the city to the suburb. For instance, those are the relationship between the ground of asphalt cut in the pipe construction site and the earth, a milk carton put on the seesaw at the rough park, high school students gathered at the convenience store next to the rice paddy, awkward graffiti drawn on the water gate near the river, pigeon’s brace sit under the bridge and so on. The mind change to go out of the city came from the fact that I myself moved to a suburban area simply, but at the same time, other psychological environment came to me when I compare the behavior of people, animals and plants and landscape in front of myself.
In this exhibition, I dismantle/reconstruct those images I saw, replace the issue of the space and object once, and attempt to search a frame of the system, a cultural difference and assimilation, through the act of art appreciation. In doing so, I refer to the body going in-between “rational aesthetics seen in the city area” and “expressionistic aesthetics related to the suburban landscape”, in fact that it is the sensation of walking or wander, landscape arising from the multiple sensation of both eyes and feet bottom.

Rui MIZUKI

MIZUKI has been creating the work about the relation between the city and human body based on his physical sensation as a skateboarder, however his new work for this exhibition focused on the suburban area outside of the city. The title of the exhibition was taken from the story of “AZUMAKUDARI” which was about the poem based on the things found on a way from the center to the east country in reference to the geographical relationship between Kyoto where the artist lives and Tokyo where the gallery is located at, and also his process of making new works developed from the landscape seen on a way from the city to the suburbia.
In the painting made out of the deck tape for the surface of skateboard and paint for the road, we can find several cracks intentionally chipped and smashed chewing gums on its surface. There are also improvised drawings on the flattened boxes of sneakers. Those works are all created by dismantling and reconstructing the existing expressive method such as photography, painting, and sculpture.
The ground we are usually standing on becomes vertical and hangs on a wall, the box to store the sneakers becomes flat, curved aluminum with the photography image printed on comes closer to the audience.
MIZUKI is interested in the physical sensation and its consciousness through the appreciation experience of the artwork, by redefining it as an action of flesh body. As if the skateboarder comes and goes both ends of the half pipe, MIZUKI’s works reciprocate between flat surface and solid object, city and suburb, main culture and subculture. When the audiences witness his work that has different kinds of polar opposites existed in our contemporary society, they become conscious of the smooth connection between the two sides. Those are not existed separately, but consist in the same contiguous earth like a journey from the center to the east country.