UTSUROI – A River Runs Through It

Galerie Eric Mouchet Brussels is pleased to present the exhibition “UTSUROI – A River Runs Through It” by Japanese artist Ken Matsubara from April 25 to July 13, 2024.

Japanese artist Ken Matsubara creates images and objects invested with an immaterial power that influences our deepest consciousness. He believes that human consciousness is made up of memories of ancient knowledge, accumulated and shared since the dawn of time. This knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation and from person to person, transcending individuality. Ken Matsubara seeks to cultivate this shared memory, and in so doing aims to erase cultural, social and historical boundaries between individuals. The 12th-century poet Kamo no Chōmei said in the “Hojoki”: “The river’s current never stops, yet the water is never the same”.

Ken Matsubara’s works draw on this concept of impermanence, which underpins the Japanese aesthetic sense. They express the fragility of memory and the melancholy of life. “Mono no aware” – the pathos of things – also one of the primordial concepts of Japanese philosophy, is associated in his recent works with the idea of impermanence. Thus, anyone observing outdated objects or flowers such as cherry blossoms, which only live for a very short time, feels moved by their beauty and a little saddened at the same time.

Ken Matsubara’s use of video echoes the fluid, changing nature of memory, while the ancient objects he transforms resemble reliquaries housing fragile apparitions. The moving images, floating on their surface or mysteriously imprisoned beneath the glass, are as much a matter of personal recollection as they are universal, so that each person can understand them according to his or her own references.

After working in New York in the 1980s and then in Japan, Ken Matsubara now captures his images mainly abroad, and then illustrates the memories that are deeply inscribed in the hearts of the people he meets there. He doesn’t do this in a nostalgic way, like repeating memories of the past, but as a way of thinking about the future, freeing himself from the loneliness and suffering inherent in human existence.

In Japanese, “Utsuroi” means “change” or “passage”. In his solo exhibition “UTSUROI” at Galerie Eric Mouchet in Brussels, Ken Matsubara presents installations including video works projected onto transparent screens and smoke, as well as two-dimensional works transferred directly from film onto glass supports.

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// Ken Matsubara
// UTSUROI – A River Runs Through It (04/25-07/13/2024 | Brussels)