RAIR | 2001-02

Kumi Yamashita |

Kumi Yamashita was born in Takasaki, Japan. She received her MFA from Glasgow School of Art and her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. Solo shows include Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, Seattle Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center, the Esplanade in Singapore, ArtFront Gallery in Tokyo and Kent Gallery in New York City. Group shows include CODA Museum in the Netherlands, the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Honolulu Museum of Art, Liverpool Biennial and Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları in Istanbul. She lives and works in Woodstock, New York. (From RAiR 50th Anniversary Exhibition Catalog, 2017)

I like looking at the light in the afternoon and watching shadows move. It reminds me that everything is always changing. I like things that do not have concrete form, like clouds, water, shadows, and the kindness of people.

I have been experimenting with light and shadows along with various other media to examine what separates solid and ephemeral, visible and invisible, inner and outer. One of the issues I focus on is the boundary we create within ourselves by categorizing the world.

Through my work I wish to remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. Knowledge, ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning.

Can we find a way to evaporate ourselves from a pond and condensate over an ocean? Can we see a common thread that connects all things?

I wish to see intellectual and sensual coexist in my work and to convey not an irony but a hope.

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition •  “Kumi yamashhita" •January 18 - February 17, 2002