For a New World – Takuma Uematsu

[Title] For a New World
[Artist] Takuma Uematsu
[Date] January 22, 2014 – March 18, 2014

Chosen as the Hermès annual theme for 2014 is “Metamorphosis.”
The key concept is to conjure up images of how artisans engineer rich transformation, or metamorphosis, in individual materials, while illustrating how objects emerging from the results of such craftsmanship mature handsomely in the process of their continued used.

Hermès, which has been devoting to the legacy of unrelenting innovation, built upon the harmony of a rigid approach to craftsmanship and the freedom of creative activity. Takuma Uematsu, a contemporary artist engaged in creation of works positioned to address the theme of linkage between the material substance of the body and life itself. Turning his attention to the Hermès methodology of constantly recurring transformation while upholding an essential order, Uematsu successfully manifests that vision in the image of life forms appearing to echo the very cycle of the natural world.

The natural world, in its enduring state of dynamic shaking and turning, abounds in potential for interaction between a myriad of substances that give birth to new circumstances. The external wall of this display is covered with glass blocks in the image of cells, brandishing expressions that differ by season, weather and time slots. The outcome transforms Maison Hermès into the literal vision of a living creature. Present here is a permanently open platform used to orchestrate the interplay, flowing beyond dimensions of space and time, between visitors, people and cars moving along the streets, gusting winds and blue skies mirrored in the glass blocks, and the legacy of Hermès. For its part, the window continues to renew its value as the true cusp of this captivating visual platform.

The carved horse glittering in orange at the left side of the front window stands as the symbol of Hermès itself. Floating featherlike above that horse’s head, meanwhile, is a second white-colored head, suggesting the image of the future of Hermès teeming with hope. On the right side, the image of a deer, a creature with deep links to human beings from before recorded history, and that of a woman both face in the same direction. United, they portray the posture of symbiosis between nature and human beings in motion toward the coming generation.

Within this window domain crafted by Uematsu, the sheer beauty of change, continually unfolding in the theater of Hermès, is transformed and linked into a chain that connects on and on, beyond the dimension of time, for as far as the eye or the mind can see.

Takuma Uematsu
Born in 1977, currently a resident of Osaka. Graduated from Kansai University in 2000. Pursuing the theme of linkage between physical matter and life, he ingeniously combines a rich range of materials into installations, while presenting formative works based on animal forms in galleries, art museums and other venues in Japan and abroad. Working to shed light on images suggesting the invisible ties that hold the world together, Uematsu carries on his mission to give expression to the new world evolving and expanding, in sustained and fluid fashion, into the future.

His primary exhibitions include, in 2013, “i want you”(WELTKUNSTZIMMER/
Germany), ART Basel Hongkong Encounters sector (Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre/Hong Kong); in 2012, Hyper-Cycle (Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room Shinjuku/Tokyo); in 2010, IMPULSE 22 with Fabian Chiquet (GALLERY Christian Löhrl /Germany); 2009, Kobe Biennale 2009 Invited Artist Exhibition LINK-Flexible Deviation (Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art), Ancient Futures (Seoul Museum of Art/South Korea), etc.

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