Yuka Tsuruno Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Nobuyuki Osaki, “Travel Journal”, from April 16th to May 21st, 2022. Osaki, who returned in March from a year long sojourn in Stuttgart under the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ overseas study program for upcoming artists, presents new video and photographic works, as well as an installation with handmade postcards sent to Japan, that ruminate on personal experiences during his time in Germany, facing a sense of “uncertainty” brought on by the covid-19 pandemic.
　
　Fascinated by the “uncertainty and ambiguity of reality”, Osaki investigates the possibility of confronting such uncertainty – in particular, how we recognize the world around us, and how these perceptions and memories exist as images. He has developed methodology that makes use of the respective properties in painting and video as media to convey the fluidity of time and the nature of memory, such as video works wherein the image gradually dissolves and diffuses with time. In recent years he blurs the imagery of personal album photos to a degree that renders the subject unidentifiable, in order to explore the relationship between pluralistic space-time and memory. At once these works evoke the ambiguity of memory and induce the ubiquity of nostalgic sentiment that surpasses generations and locality. On this foundation and in referencing contemporary cosmology and his own four-dimensional space theory, he has developed and seeks to articulate his concept of “Multiple Lighting,” which maintains that his and other people’s memories are connected beyond space and time and that this is exposed in the present.

　“Travel Journal” builds on this practice and focuses on unforeseeable changes and unpredictability brought upon by the global pandemic, as well as the subject of his research in Stuttgart – self portraits. Osaki reflects on his time abroad as “days that reinforced the feeling that we live in a fluid and uncertain world,” and that this gave more weighted meaning to “trivial encounters and interactions.” The subject of his work – while heavily influenced by societal circumstances, such as newspaper articles or encounters captured on his phone, and cityscapes – serves as documentation that reflects personal experiences that were meaningful expressly by virtue of interactions with others. The motifs metamorphose with the passage of time and the imagery indicates this process, and are marked by the influence of time and the fact of their being physically handled as quotidian items. These works, straddling and transforming across several axes of space-time, are not limited to individual experiences but rather bring to light a proximal yet strange non-representational “uncertainty” within the course of daily life that remains indeterminable and susceptible to sways in society.
　
Artist profile
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Born in 1975 in Osaka. Osaki received a BFA in Print Making from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1998, and a MFA from Graduate School of Kyoto City University of Arts in 2000. Select exhibitions include LINKING TRANSFORMATIONS (Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, 2020), Aichi Art Chronicle 1919-2019 (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, 2019), Noemi Weber/ Nobuyuki Osaki (Ludwig Forum Aachen, Germany, 2017), CONSTELLATIONS: Practice for Unseen Connections/ Discoveries (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015), VOCA 2013 (honorable mention/ Ueno Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013), The Position 2012 (Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi, 2012), NEW PHASES in CONTEMPORARY PAINTING – A Curator’s Message 2012 (Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, 2012). His work is collected in the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, among others.
　
Exhibition Outline
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Nobuyuki Osaki
Travel Journal
Date: April 16 – May 21, 2022
Opening hours: Tue – Sat, 11am – 6pm
* Closed on Sunday, Monday, and National holidays