Upcoming

"M, Acting with a Bang!"

Yuki Murai 

Feb 7 (Fri.) - Mar 8 (Sat.), 2025

MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY is delighted to present Yuki Murai’s new solo exhibition, “M, Acting with a Bang!”, opening on February 7, 2025.

Murai has consistently pushed the boundaries of painting by employing oversized canvases and uniquely developed, weighty mediums to create works that transcend traditional formats. In this exhibition, he takes a step beyond material exploration to tackle a new concept: perceiving the phenomenon of “accepting the artist’s character” as an integral part of painting expression.

According to Murai, an artist’s “character”—shaped by their behavior, words, and appearance—forms a public image through which viewers interpret the artwork. However, this process carries an inherent risk: the audience may unconsciously divide their perception between the artist’s character and the artwork itself, potentially losing sight of what should truly be discovered in the work.

How can one overcome this division to create universal and multifaceted works? How can an individual narrative connect to a greater story? In this exhibition, Murai proposes one possible answer. By treating his own “character” as a medium of painting, he integrates it with elements from Rococo painting structures, as well as manga and picture book formats, reimagining the character as something that emerges anew within the context of painting. Through this process, Murai aims to establish a space where freer and more ambitious expressions can intersect.

The exhibition will feature four two-dimensional works, two sculptural pieces, and a musical composition with lyrics and music created by Murai himself.

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Artist Statement

“Oh wow, I knew right away it was Murai-san’s painting—it’s got so much paint on it and it’s just crazy big!”

An artist’s character is shaped through the public image formed by their behavior, speech, appearance, and artistic style, which are collectively recognized and solidified in society. As part of this recognition, people can consume the artist’s works, reinforcing their character. In this context, artworks can function as props that enhance the artist’s persona.

In the context of contemporary art history, Marcel Duchamp gave prominence to ‘naming’ as a key factor in assigning value to art, establishing a framework where the worth of an artwork became embedded within the recognition of the artist’s name. Since then, the practice of art applying this framework has become far from uncommon. Today, artists market themselves as a package—character and works combined—while audiences naturally accept this dynamic.

Since the early 2000s, artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami have fused their personal character with their artworks as brand-like icons, transcending cultural, media, and community boundaries. This fortress-like, powerful singularity conceals individual differences between works and is so rigidly unambiguous that it almost rejects personal interpretations of the artworks. In my own practice, I have also presented a lively character reminiscent of a protagonist from a shōnen manga and have exhibited large, flamboyant paintings as both the stage and the marker of this persona.

One thing I strongly sense as an artist working in Japan is that when an artist’s persona is firmly established, viewers’ perspectives tend to become polarized—either focusing on the artist’s persona or on the individual work itself. The former expands the shared narrative through the artist’s character, while the latter engages in critique and discourse centered on singular works or exhibitions. This divide strips away the opportunity for practices that integrate both perspectives and the spaces where such discourse can evolve. Furthermore, the former, due to its strong influence, can inadvertently shape the way viewers engage with the artwork. For artists who perform a persona, their practice may increasingly revolve around performing that character, leading to a fragmentation and stagnation of the thematic development in their individual works. As those engaged in contemporary art, if we fail to examine how this disjointed relationship between engaging with works and accepting artistic personas affects us, we risk losing sight of our own position in relation to the artworks and ultimately, our sense of agency.

The art critic Noe Sawaragi, as if suggesting such a situation in Japan, started by separating the artist’s persona from the works that were often conflated with it when analyzing and appreciating the works of Kiyoshi Yamashita, in order to establish his own position as a viewer. *1
The creation of an artwork distills the artist’s personal concerns—ones defined by no one—into a theme, yet the work itself emerges in a form even the artist could not have anticipated. In engaging with the artwork, the viewer is free to discover unique elements within it and to subjectively interpret their causal relationships. Extending from the work, various themes, people, and objects intertwine, swirling across time and space in a constantly shifting state of existence. I believe that an artwork continues to be imbued with this alluring, uncontrollable force. However, the potential for such multifaceted relationships with a work—something inherently available to anyone—can sometimes be enclosed within the fixed identity of the artist, assimilated, replaced, or even left without a place, fading into oblivion.

To avoid such a situation and to fully appreciate the multifaceted nature of an artwork, it may be necessary not to oppose the reception of the artist’s character, but rather to consider it as an inherent condition of engaging with the work in our time.

In this exhibition, I aim to explore the intersection between our individually perceived sense of an artwork’s (both conceptual and physical) presence and the reception of the artist’s character, which has the potential to eclipse it. To this end, I employ the “reception of character” as one of the mediums of painting.

The reception of characters tends to involve overlaying characters onto the figures in fictional narratives. In this case, while the character evokes the imagination of living within a fictional world, it simultaneously exists within the painting as part of the viewer’s own narrative of appreciation. This is precisely where the ambiguous potential of character reception lies. This potential is explored in a practical manner by incorporating elements of manga and picture book formats into painting, while also referencing certain Rococo paintings that were popular in 18th-century France.

I named the three-dimensional paint material used in my works “Omuraice Paint (Omelette Rice Paint)” and marketed it as a symbolic representation of my own character. However, beyond this specific example, an artist’s signature style and visual language—elements that shape their artistic identity—can themselves become a kind of label-like character. As artworks are received as characters, how can they maintain a fluid and multifaceted nature that allows them to interact with various people and objects while preserving their own adaptability?

Through these practices, I aim to direct the flow of “sharing,” which runs as a vein through the reception of an artist’s character, not toward a space that anonymizes and aggregates people, but rather toward one that allows for the reflection of our differences.

Let us open up pathways where the works that linger around an artist’s character—the modes of creation, the eyes that perceive them, the voices that speak about them, and the hands that engage with them—can move and interact freely in all their richness.

*1 Yamashita Kiyoshi: A Monograph of His Paintings/Kawade Shobō Shinsha