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IMAI Shunsuke

2014

IMAI Shunsuke (1978-) had initially produced paintings through extracting existing images from the internet such as pornography and flowers, which he combined and overlaid to recreate various unreadable images. In recent years he has developed a series of paintings in which bright stripes and dots appear to waver like flags upon the flat surface of the picture plane. Imai first creates a random arrangement of straight stripes on the computer, which is then printed on paper. This piece of paper is three-dimensionally distorted by hand to create various curves and a sense of depth -the sections of which are reduced to simple colored surfaces and transcribed to the canvas. Although embodying aspects of abstract painting, Imai’s work can also be described as figurative painting in the sense that the artist is depicting an actual motif that is present before his own eyes. Imai is an artist who consciously engages with issues of physicality and distance that exist outside the painting, including the very experience of seeing. While the human eye recognizes the flatness of the painting, it at the same time senses depth and detects space. Due to the physical nature of seeing however, the way in which depth and space is perceived is different to according to each individual. The physical space that exists outside the painting and where the experience of viewing occurs, also serves to influence visual experience. Imai's unique process of production, while at once resolving the depth to a two-dimensional plane, achieves in recalling it again through the various undulations, overlapping, and color contrast of the stripes. In this manner he critically deconstructs the systems of painting that give birth to illusion, summoning the viewer to an active experience of “seeing.”