SPACE AND IMPROVISATION - SEIICHI KOBAYASHI (JP/SA) JUNE 2021

I was going to have this exhibition a year ago, however it was postponed due to Covid-19. During the lockdowns in Adelaide, I lost an access to my studio at Uni for several months and had to go back to Japan. I thought this pandemic would be over by 2021, however the number of infected people is still growing in Japan and the Australian border remains closed. I’ve made some new works with tools available at home and sent them to Adelaide from Japan for this show.

First and foremost, my works stem from the Rinpa school, which is one of the Japanese historical painting schools and whose style was established in the 17th century during the Edo period. Their works feature a lot of negative spaces and are compositionally highly controlled and decorative. The brush strokes are fast and rough, which creates beauty from imperfection in their images. 

Space and Improvisation investigates the process of image making from programming codes and the roles of different types of medium in our changing relationship to images. The images at this show are visualised with computer and presented on canvas through silkscreen. Computer allowed me to create an image that has complex patterns with controlled randomness without taking images from real objects or using found images. In addition to hard-edge accurate lines generated by computer, the works contains spontaneous, erratic marks caused by the hand-working process of silkscreen.