‘Works on paper are interesting because they are personal and unique’, once said a famous art collector. Perhaps it’s the familiarity and directness of the paper which draws viewer closer to the work. As if to prove this point, drawings, not paintings, decorated the walls of her warehouse filled with sculptures by Anselm Kiefer and others. Works on paper are often dismissed as drafts for artworks, but the four artists featured in the show highlights a material that’s delicate and possesses various expressive possibilities.

Taku Bannai is a popular illustrator who often works for The New Yorker magazine.  His work exudes a lingering feeling of nostalgia and manifests a touch of influence from minimalism and the West Coast color fields. In reference to the location of this exhibition, he’ll be presenting collage works inspired by travels.

Most artists analyze their own experiences before creating images. However, Arthur Huang, a brain scientist and conceptual archivist, takes the opposite journey. While reflecting on daily events, books he is reading, or music he is listening to, he moves his hands on the paper intuitively. It is afterwards when he categorizes and analyzes the ‘symbols’ left behind in the hundreds of drawings in search for the answer – what do they mean?

For Masako Kobayashi, a sculptor who explores the relationship between past and present, books have long been an inseparable part of her life. Since 2013, she has been using her favorite books as the subject matter for her work.  Reading is taking on a journey and having a simulated experience.  For this show, she presents her take on Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.

The theme for Shoko Tamai, who originally studies music, is ‘to alter the shape of emotion by geometry’. She attempts to capture a snapshot of consciousness and tactile sensation and embody the cutaneous sensation. Her unique abstract expression is created by pulling out the fibers of the handmade Tosa paper using a pen tip and painting them with ink or pigment.