KATHMANDU, Dec 27: A group art exhibition ‘Japan 4’ by four Japanese artists kicked off on Friday at Contemporary Art Gallery, Taragaon Museum, Bouddha.The artworks of artist Hideo Iida, Masae Suzuki, Izumi Tanabe, and Setsu Suzuki depict a sense of simplicity and yet are visually appealing using subtle hues like brown, grey, white, light green among others.

This exhibition is their first collaboration to be showcased in Nepal. It will showcase contemporary Japanese visual art culture with their intellectual body of paintings and sculptures. All four artists have depicted reality of human race through their paintings with their experience of living and working in Japan. According to Tanabe, she has been creating artworks using motif of white sheets where she captures the movement and depth by drawing wrinkles on a white sheet.

Tanabe shares, “I am attracted to the harmony of the soft atmosphere. Through my long working experience, I have experienced human dignity degrade so easily. Human might be cruel and violent. That though makes me ask the true meaning of dignity. I wish I can express human vitality.” Likewise, Lida thrives on capturing Japanese sense of space in her art with the concept called ‘Ma’ that is to find space between the two flowing colored inks. He explains, “We have a concept called ‘Ma’. It is very difficult concept to explain even to Japanese. For example, in ink-wash paintings and writings with Japanese ‘Washi’ paper and Chinese ink, we value ink bleed, blurriness and blank space.

Purposely creating such parts gives the art ‘a feel’. This is very similar to the concept of Japanese sense of space represented by torii-gate.” In his paintings, he has used layered colors scraped with a squeegee multiple times to create a space with different colors and shapes in-between them.

The exhibition continues till Friday.