Shun Okada and Yusuke Abe Two-person Exhibition "Bottomless Depths"

Venue: Gallery Commune

Okada Shun is an artist who continues to challenge himself with uncertain creations by projecting glitched images and tracing the images with a paintbrush. Abe Yusuke is a painter who approaches painting from multiple angles and continues to seek the truth. This exhibition, "Bottomless Depth," features these two artists, both of the same generation, who inspire each other.

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This two-person exhibition began when Shun Okada approached Yusuke Abe. Okada's idea was not just based on the fact that Abe has been a friend since their student days, but also on various other factors stemming from the current situation surrounding Okada himself.

Okada's creative method, which involves projecting glitched Famicom screens onto canvases and then replacing them with delicately applied oil paintings, appears at first glance to be systematic and intellectual. However, he has often chosen to allow external factors beyond his own intentions to intervene in his creative process. He has even adopted incorrectly applied colors as they were, or stirred up meticulously layered paints while they were still damp. In one notable example, he considered a work "complete" the moment the shaking of an earthquake disrupted his brushstrokes. For Okada, this represents an avant-garde and intellectual approach to painting, but more than that, it represents a desperate dive into a zone of what might be called an "accidental creative moment" that is even more difficult to put into words. Okada currently feels a certain stagnation in his own creative practice and the closed environment of the Japanese art world. As a way to break through this situation, he is aiming to destroy what has solidified within himself through a joint exhibition with the artist Yusuke Abe. In short, it could be said that Abe was appointed as one of the "external factors" mentioned above.

Abe's work to date has focused on concrete motifs, such as his childhood experiences of fishing and insect collecting, or the video and card games of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In contrast, his most recent exhibitions have focused exclusively on works that, at first glance, appear highly abstract, making extensive use of different materials like wood and plastic, and non-representational imagery. Regardless of the superficial differences in these works, however, the core of his sensibility remains the same: how color, shape, texture, and his own experience of painting them come together and come to fruition in a single painting. These are questions Abe has consistently explored and confirmed, and as he continues to produce a vast array of works, his ideas and methods have continually evolved and diversified. This exhibition, for the first time in a while, will focus on works using "concrete" motifs. Yet, these works, along with their unchanging core, also incorporate his steadily evolving techniques and sensibilities. ---Okada seems to hope that this two-person exhibition with Abe, who continues to make such powerful and sincere progress, will function as a kind of shock therapy for him.

When considering the two artists, Okada and Abe, it may be necessary to some extent in art historical and critical discourse to extract superficial elements, such as the motifs depicted in their paintings, and to interpret their works from the perspectives of subculture history or media theory, or to link them to postmodern contexts and the various issues inherent in contemporary society. However, in many cases, this is probably relatively easy. What lies at the core of their work seems both simpler and more indescribable, and its expression and observation will likely be a key theme in this two-person exhibition in particular. In a word, it is something like the earnestness, sincerity, or bottomless depth that lies in "how one person approaches a painting and how they create a painting." Again, it is something very simple, yet perhaps the most indescribable.

Text: Tanaka Kotaro / Independent Curator

Shun Okada |
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1992. Artist currently living in Tokyo.
@oka_un | shunshon.tumblr.com

Yusuke Abe |
Born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1993, he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Tama Art University in 2016 and completed his graduate studies at Tama Art University in 2018. He is currently based in Saitama Prefecture. He is a painter.