ART PLATFORM TOKYO @ ANA InterContinental Tokyo proudly presents the 15^th exhibition ‘Out of the Blue’, a two-artist exhibition featuring Ai Makita and Mitsumasa Kadota.

For Ai Makita, this is her long-awaited second two-artist show at ART PLATFORM TOKYO @ ANA InterContinental Tokyo, after receiving raves from both Japanese and international art fans in our third exhibition in 2018.  She’ll be having her first show in NYC at mh PROJECT from mid-June.

Makita depicts shiny inorganic motifs such as machineries, engine parts, and metallic music instruments in dynamic way, making them look alive and almost breathing. In order to create the image, she first combines different digital images on her computer screen and then painstakingly render that same image on canvas, giving them a human touch.  Machineries and metal parts are human made. With the advent of AI, the border between machineries and human, organic and inorganic, has become increasingly blurred and has been constantly updated with time passage, questioning where we human stand in the world.  What she is trying to do isn’t to depict the society in realistic style – instead, to paint the parallel world between digital and physical domain using completely alien motifs.

Mitsumasa Kadota, too, has been highly acclaimed in the States, having been invited by Young Patron Program at MoMA to have a solo exhibition at Lincoln Center in 2019.

Kadota’s work that weaves in myriad of fluid colors reminds us of marble papers made in Florence.  Within the symphony of colors, sometimes we hear the harmony filled with laughter, and other times discordance.  Since he was young, he had ADHD and due to his difficult family situation at home, he said his feeling had constantly swung from self-affirmation to self-denial.  He grew up watching the ocean in Shizuoka which makes one  sense the ‘fluctuation of wave’ at the base of his work. His work reflects his quest for who he is, but in this exhibition, he also incorporated another theme – continuity. We live ‘today’ by denying ‘yesterday’ and look at ‘tomorrow’ with angst and expectation.  In the triptych exhibited in the show, his affection for his young family is reflected.  In the era of Covid watching his young family grow, Kadota said he was freshly reminded that life is built upon repeating continuity of yesterday to tomorrow, the past to the future.