GALLERY MoMo Projects is pleased to announce "Flow," Eisuke Sato's solo exhibition from December 2 (Sat) to January 20, 2024.

Eisuke Sato was born in Oita, Japan in 1973. After completing the MFA program at American University in 2001, he was discovered by Takashi Murakami at "GEISAI4" in 2002, for which he received the Liquitex Award. The following year, several of his works were featured in the "Artist by Artist" exhibition at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo.

Since 2004, the gallery has continued to feature his works in the exhibitions, and some of his representative works are in the Takahashi Collection. He continues to work in Hita City, Oita Prefecture, known for its natural water supply while earning a living by taking over his family's forestry business.

In such an environment, he cannot separate nature such as water and trees from his own existence and it forms the basis of his expression.

The artist's expression on the theme of life and death, in which he overlaps the years from the days when he can remember until now, when he has lived 50 years, with the annual rings of trees that have been cut down, questions the reason for his own existence, accepts his condition while cutting down the limited daily time, and feeds on it, will approach the viewer with a universality.

In this exhibition, Sato will present works depicting people who stand at the halfway point in terms of age, thinking and feeling the time remaining, and who bear existential anguish, gripped by the fear and uncertainty of time passing like flowing water amidst the changes of physical aging and practical unreasonableness.

Sato expresses this sense of fear through distorted and misshapen figures, but he states that he does not seek to convey this sense of fear to others, but rather finds beauty in the distortion and disintegration of the figures. By eliminating the Western perspective, he attempts to depict an unspecified fluid time by layering planes of surfaces and lines, as well as canvases, to blur depth. We hope you will enjoy viewing approximately 20 of his latest works.

Artist's Comment

Fifty years have passed since I was born. I do not feel any change in my consciousness, but my body, which is its vehicle, is changing (deteriorating) day by day. My eyesight is deteriorating, my skin is wrinkling, my hair is thinning, my body is not moving as it should, and I am in pain. I am in the irresistible flow of time, and I estimate that in about 50 years, my body, which is my vehicle, will cease to function completely, and my consciousness will disappear at the same time.

In the hours immediately after waking up in the morning, I have a strong sense that my consciousness and my body have diverged, and although I find it hard to believe that my consciousness will definitely disappear in the future, the fact that this time will surely come is so real that I feel an irresistible sense of dread. I wonder if I can somehow switch to a different vehicle. I wondered if it was possible to be so unreasonable, even though I just found myself here.

I usually work with wood. The annual rings on the cross-section of a log appear as a circular line as the Earth completes one revolution around the sun. The tree grows differently in spring and fall, so the time span of 365 days is engraved as one circle. And it is beautiful.

What I want to depict is the flow of time flowing through me. At the same time, there is a strong sense of fear about the loss of consciousness at the end of the flow. Death comes equally, regardless of position or environment. I want to depict this universal phenomenon beautifully, preferably like the rings of a tree.

Eisuke Sato, 2023