Kinosho Kikaku is delighted to present to you Shoichi Tsurukawa’s solo exhibition.

With his bold use of colors and distinctive techniques, Tsurukawa’s works contain an exceedingly forceful personality. It is as if he has carefully captured and stained every bit of momentary emotions that often fill his heart with vivid colors, and condensed them onto one single pictorial scene.

According to Tsurukawa, he is often indulged in the colors of emotions. Being extra sensitive to the colors of happiness, anger and grief, he is always drawn by the vividness of his own emotions, which is portrayed thoroughly by the density and richness of colors in all of his works.

The techniques he uses in creating his works are staining and pen painting. Though both techniques share a miniature-esque preciseness, he did not tend to restrain himself to such particular representation. For him, it is rather an amplification of the overflowing and piling up of layers of emotions. “What I want to portray is humans, namely the common ‘something’ that lies underneath our appearance.” He said, “But as I do not know much about other human beings, I decided to draw myself, a human named ‘Shoichi Tsurukawa’.”

The reason he chose staining as the main technique in his creation of works is that the transition of the colors is able to reflect the flow of his emotions in a more realistic manner.  “My works are like the crushed rubbles of my aspiration and fate from the brutal reality.” The aspiration and fate did not go weathered. Through his own hands, they have transformed into rubbles and continue to pile up along his journey of life.
This very exhibition will be showing a number of new and old works of Tsurukawa. We hope that through the stained “rubbles” of emotions portrayed in his works, you are able to meet Shoichi Tsurukawa as a human being and hopefully, discover the “something” that lies underneath our skin.

Kinosho Kikaku is pleased to present to you “Container of the Ghost―H.K solo exhibition”.

For H.K, the soul is stuck on the body rather than existing within it. There are times when he feels as if his soul will be slipped off the body and nowhere to be found, as if the human body is a container, and the soul constantly disagrees to settle within it. The existence of the consciousness becomes chaotic and doubtful. Through the act of painting, he is able to grasp the solid feeling of being alive as a human being.

In such sense, his works can be considered as the result of the struggling of preventing his chaotic self consciousness from fading away, a testimonial“lump”that might as well compensate the complicated feelings of doubtfulness of the existence of the soul. “I feel like I am able to feel truly alive as I try to portray the slipping away of the soul.” He commented. This exhibition shows works that depict “the soul’s attachment to the body”, and “the body as the container of the soul”, adding in flowers as significant symbolic elements to the theme.

H.K considers his works more as landscape paintings than a composition of flowers and human figures . By transforming human figures into landscapes, the human characteristics decade thus make them become more of an obscure figure. The unique spacial composition of “Ma” in Japanese painting also elaborates the presentation of the soul trapped between life and death. The blossoming and decaying of flowers, on the other hand, symbolizes the passage of time. It is a celebration of birth and at the same time, a farewell tribute to death. Flowers serve as an amplification of the image of human. In his works, the two surpass the physical boundaries of flowers and human and purely exist as living creatures of equality. Both serve as the carriers that express the relationships between alive and death as well as body and soul.

This very exhibition may be an inspiration for us to recognize the presence of our soul. We sincerely hope you can enjoy his unique view of the world.