Gajah Gallery is proud to announce its first inclusion this year in Art Fair Tokyo – the largest gallery show in Japan. Now in its 11th Edition, the fair will feature more than 160 participating galleries from Japan and overseas. Art Fair Tokyo will be held from 12-14 May at the Tokyo International Forum.
Gajah is the first Singaporean gallery to be invited to exhibit at Art Fair Tokyo. Celebrating 20 years since emerging in the regional art scene, Gajah Gallery looks to expand their artists’ presence in the growing Japanese art market.
Featured Artists include Ashley Bickerton, Jason Lim, Kumari Nahappan, Li Jin, Sabri Idrus, Suzann Victor, and Yunizar.
Ashley Bickerton (United States) is a maverick in the Contemporary South East Asian art scene. For over 20 years, the artist has focused his attention on the exotification and commodification of culture, assembling beautifully grotesque compositions that expose the affectations of modern culture through the portrayal of female bodies.
Jason Lim (Singapore) forms organic shapes from charred brick, ash, molten metal and other found objects in Landscape Series. These sculptures are highly tactile representations of natural landscapes, in a palate reminiscent of volcanic rock.
Kumari Nahappan (Singapore) is widely recognized for her sculptural work, which ranges from table pieces to large scale public commissions. Using simple composition and strong vibrant colours, Kumari’s works are philosophical, reflecting on life and energy. At Art Fair Tokyo she will debut the first sculpture in her new series ‘Sprouting’, where a seed breaks its shape to find new form.
Li Jin (China) will exhibit 12 new, highly anticipated paintings from his ongoing series ‘Impressions of Bali’, which debuted in Hong Kong in March and was quickly sold out. In this series, Li Jin ventures into new artistic territory by painting an array of bizarre and provocative subjects in a lush, tropical color palette.
Sabri Idrus (Malaysia) is one of the most stimulating artists in Malaysia, whose work is inspired by surface and spatial stacking in a physical and metaphorical sense. His extensive process of abstraction and layering causes forms to appear, vanish, and intermix: shaping the relationship and the possibility of inter-expression unendingly
Suzann Victor (Singapore) gained reputation as a ‘subversive’ artist in Singapore in the 90’s before going on to build some of the most powerful art installations in the region, including ‘Rainbow Circle’, commissioned by the National Museum of Singapore in 2013, ‘Contours of a Rich Maneuver’ at Art Stage 2015, and ‘Bloodline of Peace’ at SAM. Having first exhibited in Japan in 1995, Suzann now returns over 20 years later with ‘Mother’, a life-sized statue of the Madonna, encrusted in gradated crushed glass.
Yunizar (Indonesia) continues to reinterpret the classical notion of bronze art and present it in a contemporary fashion with his unmistakably quirky aesthetic and the unrefined silhouette of his sculptures. Yunizar will premiere a new painting in addition to two new sculptures, including the second edition of ‘Deer’, which will feature the bronze figure in an opulent tortoise-shell gold patina developed by the artisans at Yogya Art Lab.
