庄司朝美：稀人说（よそ者の話）
Asami SHOJI: A Stranger’s Tales
Level 1, Spring Studios
50 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013
LINSEED很高兴参展Independent New York 2024，展出庄司朝美（Asami SHOJI, b.1988, 日本）的首次国际个人项目“稀人说（よそ者の話）”，呈现其一系列全新布面作品，以及艺术家在展位与在地现成物互动的绘画表演。庄司的早期创作常常以切身环境中的光滑表面作为“画布”，直觉式地表达临场的、与或熟悉或陌生环境多层次的感受。此次展览则首次系统性展出艺术家以“绘画表演”为基础的布面作品。艺术家在厚厚底色颜料上覆盖稀释的油画颜料，并从中捕捉浮现出的类似形体的形状。通过画作中难以捉摸的、似乎没有皮肤的形象，在身体、界限和交错相会中展开非线性叙事。每幅作品都以作画日期命名，庄司的创作因而既像是日常的喃喃自语，也像是在召唤与他人的独特联系。通过温柔的触摸，庄司的作品试图探索陌生身体之间的互渗与连结，来抵达身体与空间更远的意义。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
24.4.13, 2024
布面油画 Oil on canvas
173 × 104 cm
骇人又迷人，幽灵般的生命形象从淤浊的色彩背景中出现又隐匿。庄司作品中空间的模糊性使身体失去了重量，画面似乎是置身于呓梦中的景象。时刻提心吊胆，在幻影出现时这个梦达到了高潮。而这些形象往往只在最私密的时刻出现，又好像是独自身处在一个空间时唯一可以倾诉的对象，即使他们是如此诡秘，如同彼此叙事中的画外音。庄司从年幼时就在不同城市间迁移，不停的切换也使得与这些空间永远陌生。平滑冰冷的表面上与黏腻的颜料之间，正上演着一个人与孤独的对决。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
24.1.20, 2024
布面油画 Oil on canvas
103 × 72.8 cm
观众往往会在视线扫过画面时偶然碰上一个身体，而不是直接被正面迎击。虽然难以辨别哪里是身体边缘的开始或结束，但一些临近消亡的身体比起另一些可以直接看见其骨架的形体总归看着更有肉身性。这些画作让人想起日本传统绘画中的《九相图（九相図 ）》，这些图像将肉身的消亡分为九个阶段，而这实际上是一个只有在离身体很远的立场上才能进行的分割。而庄司的作品不假区分，而是探索艺术家曾经在面对自己身体的枯荣时连带着的所有复杂情感。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
24.3.26, 2024
布面油画 Oil on canvas
97 × 162.5 cm
“快乐与悲伤、爱与死亡……”的纷杂情绪在庄司的画作中微妙地碰撞又温柔地和解。在《24.4.13 》中，一边是边顾影自怜的手势，似乎暗示着水中捞月的无力，而另一边看似天真无暇的面目却翻山越岭穿过真实与镜像的界线，形成一个令人抚慰的循环；《24.3.26》将《创造亚当（The Creation of Adam）》和《圣塞巴斯蒂安的殉难 （The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian）》中的肢体纽结在一起，而庄司对他们标志性手势的微妙改变也意味着它们拒绝单纯图像意义上的指认，没有纯粹的开始或终止。《24.3.9》让人想起《美杜莎之筏（The Raft of the Medusa）》（其中每只手都被赋予了特殊的情节），然而庄司这幅作品中的手，却好像无从得知到底是在挣扎还是不再抵抗、是在退缩还是在拥抱。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
24.3.9, 2024
布面油画 Oil on canvas
15 × 21.4 cm
作品中可以确定的是，手在触碰，身体在被触碰，他们独立、亲密，又缠绕。这也像是庄司通过倾听他人故事而“感受和触摸到未见的风景和情感的纹理”的视觉修辞。正如女性主义作家及学者莎拉·艾哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）所阐释的，对陌生人的恐惧来自一种误解，误认为身体与身体间的不同和边界是天然的、固定的、是需要捍卫的。与此相反，触摸总是相互的：“身体之所以是身体正因为它能感受别的身体。”[1] 正如这些作品中，手臂往往异乎寻常的长也异乎寻常的柔韧，似乎这样就能拥抱得更多一些。时而惊心，却又更常是抚慰的相遇中不乏戏谑的幽默，庄司的作品揭开了身体与身体之间感受力，用艺术家的话说，这些陌生的身体 “住在我的身体里面”。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
24.2.19, 2023
布面油画 Oil on canvas
23 × 16 cm
参考文献：
[1] Gail Weiss. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. 1999
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
庄司朝美 (Asami SHOJI) 1988年出生于日本福岛，于2012年获得东京多摩美术大学(Tama Art University)版画艺术硕士学位，目前生活工作于东京。庄司朝美的作品将轮廓线条视为阈限空间，而非隔离对立面的界限，打开了以其运动为特征的维度。不同生命体因而也不再标志着边界的划定，而是互相感受的可能，庄司以此探索身体之间的互渗与连结，来重新思考身体及其内与外的意义。在她的创作中，绘画不仅仅是视觉图像，而承载了文化交融叙事下，临场的、与环境之间的、直觉式的多层次感受。她的画作所带来的空间体验超越了静态领域，产生了一种动态的画面，感官知觉相互交织、不受限制地流动，邀请观者进入错综复杂的叙事和感官探索。
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
23.12.7, 2023
布面油画 Oil on canvas
41 × 32 cm
庄司朝美 Asami SHOJI
23.12.3, 2023
布面油画 Oil on canvas
32.8 × 40.3 cm
LINSEED is thrilled to present the first international solo project of Asami SHOJI (b.1988, Japan) “A Stranger’s Tales” at Independent New York 2024, featuring a series of the artist's latest paintings on canvas and glass, and her on-site painting performance interacting with ready-made objects. Shoji’s earlier practice engages existing smooth surfaces in her physical proximity as canvases, expressing spontaneous and multilayered feelings in different, familiar or foreign, surroundings. This exhibition is the first to systematically display the artist's works on canvas rooted in the notion of painting performance. With each canvas work presenting elusive and skinless figures that emerge from the dilute oil paint overlaid on the thick priming pigments, the selection unfolds nonlinear narratives in the themes of body, boundaries, and strange encounters. As each work is named after the date of painting, Shoji’s practice appears at once as diarial mumbles and invocations of unique connections with strangers. Through her gentle touches, Shoji opens up the place for permeability and connectedness to others and expands the sense of the body and space.
Spectral figures and creatures in Shoji’s work both propagate out of and recede in the background of smudgy colors. The ambiguity of space seems to deprive bodies of weight and suggests a nightmarish reverie that wears on the nerves and culminates in the appearance of the incubus-like figures. Yet there’s no way to meet these figures but in the most intimate and solitary moments, as if they are the only ones you can talk to, or as if they are your words, as ghoulish as they may seem. Shoji has been moving from city to city since she was young, the constant switch that alienates her from space. Between the smooth, cold surface and the slimy paint, she alone negotiates with her solitude.
The viewer, more often than not, comes across a body rather than gets confronted by it when running eyes over the image. While it is often difficult to discern where they begin and end, fleshy bodies on the brink of perishing are sometimes juxtaposed with those through which skeletons can be seen. Reminiscent of kusōzu (九相図 nine-phase pictures), these paintings, however, are as if reintegrating the stages of decomposition that are only plausible taken from a standpoint remote from the body. They are led, instead, by the sentiments Shoji had once experienced at a younger age that are inextricably woven into the course of decay.
Complex feelings of “happiness and sadness, love and death, …” subtly collide and tenderly reconcile in Shoji’s paintings. In 24.4.13, on one side, the dislocated arms of the seemingly narcissistic figure suggest the vanity of phantasy, while on the right side, the seemingly innocent figures traverse the line between the real and the imaginary, forming a soothing loop; 24.3.26 interlaces The Creation of Adam and The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the slightly distorted hand gestures defy any definitive reading of referential meaning. In 24.3.9, there’s a nod to The Raft of the Medusa in which each hand masterfully suggests a peculiar narration. However, in Shoji’s work, there’s no clear line between floundering and succumbing, and between withdrawal and embracement.
Hands are touching; bodies are being touched, intimately and convolutedly. The touch seems to be a visual rhetoric of Shoji’s penchant for listening to others’ stories through which she “feel[s] and touch[es] the texture of unseen landscapes and emotions.” As feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed has already elucidated, the fear of the stranger is a misconception of difference and boundary being static, something to defend. The touch, on the other hand, is always reciprocal: “To be embodied is to be capable of being affected by other bodies.”[1] As in these works, the arms are often disproportionately long and unusually pliable, embracing as much as they can. Breathtakingly strange, sometimes ironical and humorous, yet mesmerizingly soothing encounters in Shoji’s work unveil the affection that flows between bodies. Those strange bodies, to use the artist’s words, “live inside me.”
[1] Gail Weiss. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. 1999
About the Artist
Asami SHOJI was born in 1988 in Fukushima, Japan. She obtained her MFA in printmaking from Tama Art University in Tokyo in 2012. She currently lives and works in Tokyo. Shoji’s work envisions lines, the contours of the creatures in her paintings, as a threshold that opens up dimensions characterized by their movements, rather than boundaries segregating the opposites. Instead of the border of the subject, bodies in Shoji’s work mark the flow of affections where Shoji opens up the place for permeability and connectedness to others and expands the sense of the body and the inside and outside. Painting not merely a visual image, Shoji expresses spontaneous and multilayered feelings in different surroundings against the backdrop of unprecedented mobility. The spatial experiences conjured by her paintings transcend the static realm, giving birth to a dynamic tableau where sensory perceptions intermingle and flow unrestrictedly and inviting the viewer into intricate narratives and perceptual explorations.
Her selected solo exhibitions include: "A Stranger's Tales", 2024, Independent Art Fair with LINSEED, New York; “a Gait Without Foot”, 2023, gallery21yo-j, Tokyo; “From Tbilisi with Love”, 2022-23, DECAMERON, Tokyo; “Tomorrow’s Unseen Mythologies”, 2021, gallery21yo-j, Tokyo; “Diagram of the Mud”, 2018, Cale, Tokyo; “During a Night”, 2017, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo. Her selected group exhibitions include: “Hyakunengo Art Festival”, 2024, Hyakunengo Art Festival, Chiba Prefecture;“Onsen Confidential”, 2024, LINSEED, Tokyo; “Body, Love, Gender”, Curated by Kim Sunhee and Tsubaki Reiko, Gana Art Center, Seoul; “Gestures of Resistance”, 2023, LINSEED in collaboration with A.I., London; “Yearning for Vision”, 2023, Taro Okamoto Museum of Art (Kanagawa), Ashikaga Museum of Art (Tochigi), Kurume City Art Museum (Fukuoka); “50 seconds”, 2023, soda, Yebisu International Festival For Art & Alternative Visions 2023, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo; “Eyes of the wind Vol.1”, 2022, Obscura, Tbilisi; “The Way of Paintings”, 2022, SOMPO Museum of Art, Tokyo; “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2015”, 2015, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), Tokyo; “The 18th Taro Okamoto Memorial Award for Contemporary Art”, 2015, Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa.
