Long-Term memory
Oil on canvas, Led tube light, Aclylic paint on wall
H500 × W1200 cm
Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexions, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019
Photo: Kioku Keizo
Photo courtesy: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo



Using the image editing software Photoshop, Kei Imazu reconfigures a variety of images that exist online, processing them using the software’s smudge tool and depicting the resultant images e on canvas with oil pigment. The images that she uses are drawn from a wide swath of art history, ranging from Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) to the sculptures of Kaikei (year of birth and death unknown) and ancient Greece. She is particularly interested in iconoclasm and the way in which sculptures that have been forcibly moved or destroyed due to war and colonial rule can be preserved online. By positioning her own practice and method as an extension of the impact of this new archiving format, as well as the history of painting that has been influenced by various technological and scientific advances, from the invention of photographic techniques to the widespread adoption of smartphones, Imazu offers us a highly subjective take on the forms that painting can take in our contemporary period.

Long-Term Memory (2018), which is on display at this exhibition, is a new paintings that Imazu has been making in recent on the left is set against a installation that focuses on years. The CPR training dummy in the painting blue background and resembles a drowned man. In addition to the image of a mother and child, diagram of a womb and ovaries, lips, and other motifs that evoke femininity, the painting of organisms that first began underwater. The spaces inhabited by these motifs are blanketed by tiles typically found in homes in Indonesia, where Imazu moved last year. Juxtaposing his face with a living, sexual space where various events are joined in a state on the right depicts the evolution process uew e dying with a look of ecstasy on of chaos, Imazu takes events from her own life as a starting point to depict a range of elemental subjects such as evolution, life, and its origin that is water.

(Haruko Kumakura: Curator of Mori Art Museum)
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