ART CITIES:Tokyo-Atsushi Saga

Atsushi Saga’s painted surfaces have such a perfect finish that they could be mistaken for manufactured products. Their sheen enables the viewer to see his or her own reflection. Although the attempts of the viewer’s conscious mind to breach the work are initially rebuffed, gradually confronting the piece over time eventually draws the viewer behind the surface of the stronghold, giving glimpses of the stories that lie within.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: SCAI The Bathhouse Archive

For the past decade Atsushi Saga has been mastering his technique of manually polishing the painted surface to attain a mirror-like effect, exploring the limit of what is possible by hand, however, unlike industrially finished material, the surface is manually conditioned and displays minute differences in its material depth and color. “Perception”, Atsushi Saga’s solo exhibition at SCAI The Bathhouse, signals the viewer to these fine differences confined within this medium plane. His new series “Inside” (2015- ) are blue painted wood boards coated with Urethane, on which five vertical stripes subtly appear under the transparent layer. The five stripes are borrowed from the patterns used for the Genji-ko, in which participants are invited to appreciate five selections of aroma, and identify the same. This is described on the five-stripe diagram which Saga uses for his paintings. Within Western Art History, the stripes evoke the work of Daniel Buren, who formed the artist collective BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni), one of the main representatives of minimalism in France in the ‘60s. For Buren, the stripes are imitable and easily duplicated as aesthetic archetypes and critical tools for addressing questions of how we look, perceive, and appropriate. Saga imbues his painting with a vague stripe pattern through which the viewers negotiate their own reflections between seeing and gazing, perceiving and sensing.

Info: SCAI The Bathhouse, Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 8/7-6/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.scaithebathhouse.com