HOUSTON, TX.- Asia Society Texas Center is presenting a new exhibition of large-scale, mixed-media sculptures by Japanese artist Yuriko Yamaguchi. The self-titled exhibition opened to the public Saturday, April 23, 2016.
“Yamaguchi’s works, with their organic presence and compelling dynamism, challenge us to connect with our environments in fresh ways,” says Bridget Bray, the Center’s Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions.
The artist’s sculptures feature fragments of hand-cast resins, wire, and LED light, suspended in space and seemingly growing from the building. The artist’s web-like structures are not made by following a particular process; rather, each sculpture represents a series of adaptations and choices, growing naturally and spontaneously, much like a living organism does. Yamaguchi has previously explained that the purpose of her works is to “remind people that we are all connected in many overlapping webs woven out of the common forces that affect the human condition: family origin, economic stressors, religious beliefs, nature, time, place, and technology.” Through her works, she seeks to explore the constantly changing but ever-present hidden connections that bind the human experience to the natural world.
Her Cloud series in particular, speaks to the intersection of digital networks and art. “Once we get into the cloud, we become surrounded by humid air and find nothing,” says Yamaguchi. Both her art and the digital cloud are seen as “artificial” and “able to multiply endlessly.”
Yamaguchi’s abstract sculptures resonate uniquely in the spaces in which they are installed, and for her exhibition at Asia Society, she will create an original work for the Center’s Fayez Sarofim Grand Hall called Weaving Time. “Architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s vision of the Fayez Sarofim Grand Hall is the ideal ‘palette’ for Yamaguchi to use,” elaborates Bray. “Her spontaneous responses to architectural structures introduce a tension between the built environment and our lived experience of such spaces, emphasizing movement, color, and the play of light, which alters as the day progresses.”
The exhibition will be on view through August 21, 2016.
Born in Osaka, Japan in 1948, Yuriko Yamaguchi moved to the United States in the early 1970s and received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. After studying at Princeton University, she was awarded an MFA at the University of Maryland, College Park. Yamaguchi's work has previously been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Field Museum in Chicago, The Kanagawa Museum of Modern Art in Japan, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Artist Residency award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Yamaguchi lives and works in the Washington, DC area.
