Soshi Matsunobe

  • Soshi Matsunobe graduated from Kyoto Saga University of Arts in 2008 and studied in France on a Polar Arts Foundation...

    Soshi Matsunobe graduated from Kyoto Saga University of Arts in 2008 and studied in France on a Polar Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2023. He currently lives and works in Kyoto and Shiga. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, and installation, Matsunobe reveals the concept of emptiness - holes and gaps, shadows and spaces - as two- and three-dimensional objects. Understanding art as spiritual, he focuses on how the form of art can convey the ideas and concepts behind it. Taking perception and experience as the object of interpretation, He imagines the space beyond the unrecognizable and the gap between reality.

     

    Major solo exhibitions include Woven Knot (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2024), Space around dining tables (Les Chambres, Paris, 2024), The Roads Stretch on the Show (SCARTS, Sapporo, 2023), and Ghost of Copy (The container, Tokyo, 2021). Major group exhibitions include Furniture and Drawer (A-LAB, Hyogo, 2024), Stones and Plants (Shiga Museum of Art, Shiga, 2024), Soft Territory (Shiga Museum of Art, Shiga, 2021), Surrounding area (Bunka Union/Halflaw, Tokyo, 2020), FLASH MATTER (Gallery PARC, Kyoto, 2019), Invisible Strings in Spring (Devening Projects, Chicago, 2018), and others.

  • Matsunobe has been expressing the concept of space and emptiness, from a single dot to lines, holes, and shadows, as two-dimensional images and three-dimensional real objects. 

     

    The exhibition Woven Knot focuses on the concept of dimensionality and explores the spatiality of lines. Using the keywords "line," "drawing," and "calligraphy," the exhibition explores the space that lines create, as well as their inherent kinetic and materiality. Whether in calligraphy, where words are considered images, or in drawing, where multiple lines converge into a single form, the artist explores the three-dimensional aspects surrounding lines, distinguishing between the experience of drawing them and the experience of seeing them.


    In the exhibition, both of the works, Woven Knot  and Knot (Wall Drawing) are scribbled on paper in an improvisational manner and then scanned into a computer using design software. They are then completed by tracing the lines, manipulating their intersections, and editing the order in which they were drawn. Based on these procedures, the artist creates a stencil-like template from the data and then uses the template to redraw the lines on paper. The lines have a parallel structure and are based on the same original drawing with variations. Lines from the same image are superimposed on the same frame, revealing different degrees of mobility.

  • While the overall shapes have a sense of speed and improvisational rhythm, like a stroke endowed with the movement of the human body, the detailed lines are densely woven together based on quantified calculations. For Knot (wall drawing), he draws his own image on the wall. The material used is not pencil or pen, but shredded paper. Just as lines come together to form a face, the drawings made by paper reveal the two-dimensional nature of the face in the form of lines, and further emphasize their materiality in three-dimensional space by being attached to the wall.

  • In Japanese calligrapher Kyūyō Ishikawa's book The Way to Calligraphy, Matsunobe finds a passage in which the ink of the brush and pen is not simply the paint, but “the unlighted shadows created in the traces of engraving.” He notes the relationship and conceptual perception of line and shadow, and speaks of the sense of repetition and boredom it evokes. Specifically, he asks us to imagine the traces of things that light has not penetrated from the image of shadows. Motifs such as stones, rubber bands, humming, and lathes appear in his work. He expresses the shapes directly with dots or lines, which is his metaphor for line/shadow.

     

    Just as painting had to re-identify itself with the advent of photography and printing technology, Matsunobe's work offers a meditative experience of boredom and monotony from the overstimulation and sensation of images in the contemporary scene. The seemingly scribbled forms with missing letters, or the playful weightlessness of the lines, evoke a sense of the poetry of the image among the figures and shadows.

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