The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is the venue for Luminescence, an exhibition comprising an installation and photography by Yukako Shibata. According to a Japan House introduction, Shibata’s work shares a common vocabulary, which is essentially minimal, of objects that are touched with a Japanese aesthetic of subtlety and simplicity in colour and shape. This aesthetic emphasises suggestion rather than insistence, also latency and the use of empty space and quietness. The texture qualities of lacquer ware are evident, as is the practice of paying as much attention to invisible, hidden areas of an object as to the visible surfaces."
Yukako Shibata was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1972. She completed her MA in Painting at the Royal Collage of Art in 2005, during which she was awarded an Artist Residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2003. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and has had solo shows at the Light contemporary, London (2006) and the Atrium Gallery, London (2006). Shibata lives and works in London.
In her work, according to the exhibtion notice, "Shibata explores the fugitive colours of the natural world, and questions the complex interplay of light, atmosphere and the human perceptual system. Finding the inner light in all things mundane inspires her, and it is these moments of reverie that are embodied in the work. Each of her works is a journey of discovery through play and observation, where the destination remains open. She deals with the microcosm in order to gain access to the universal that exists both within and around it."
In this exhibition, she dedicates one room at the venue, a Regency townhouse overlooking Regents Park, solely to the site installation, with painted wall-based objects creating clusters in the space. In the other room, she displays photographs of the objects taken in a variety of outdoor settings, as if to return the objects to the natural world that first inspired them.
Yukako Shibata says, "My intention is for viewers to experience my objects as meditative entities which can stimulate memory, and which embody qualities of being precious, desirable and seductive."
luminescence will be open from 31 March to 22 May 2008, 9.30am-5.00pm (expect bank holidays), at Daiwa Foundation Japan House, 13/14 Cornwall Terrace, London, NW1 4QP. Late openings till 8.00pm are on 24 April and 14 May.
