Yoshiko Kanai: Bridging East and West with Colorful Thread

Mar 2
08:37

2017

Maria Stella

Maria Stella

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NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Japanese artist Yoshiko Kanai in Mélange of Milieu. The exhibition opens February 14, 2017 and runs through March 7, 2017 with an opening reception on Thursday, February 16 from 6-8 pm.

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The mixed media art of Japanese artist Yoshiko Kanai is both a poignant tribute to traditional Japanese art and a beautiful expression of the many ways in which our global cultures intersect to create new and lovely themes and contextual meanings. Kanai’s art is unique,Yoshiko Kanai: Bridging East and West with Colorful Thread  Articles in that she uses acrylic paints on small wood pieces and then wraps them with threads to form a variety of visual effects. Each pattern contains its own visual connotation, inspired by nature and the modern world in both physical and metaphysical ways.

 

Although she studied and worked in the United States for decades, today Yoshiko Kanai lives and works in Yugawara, Japan. Her art, in a way, reflects this journey... inspired at once by an early 20th century NYC thread factory and Japanese artistic traditions. As the artist explains quite eloquently, "My work is a reflection of my life. It contains everything about myself in the present and the past strung through by a long piece of thread. Now, these beautiful threads will lead me to new creative possibilities."

 

Exhibition Dates: February 14, 2017  – March 7, 2017

Reception: Thursday, February 16, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11-6

Gallery Location: 530 West 25th St, Chelsea, New York

Event URL: http://www.agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Yoshiko_Kanai.aspx

 

Featured Artists:

 

Mélange of Milieu

Anna Voloshko  |  MORLOT Claude  |  Doris Brown  |  Yuliya Pogreb  |  HERMINE  |  Sa Peng  |  Yoshiko Kanai  |  Rita Galambos  |  Stacie Hernandez  |  Michael Alberon  

 

About the Exhibition

 

Mélange of Milieu: Defying Category

 

This February Agora Gallery presents Mélange of Milieu, a group exhibition highlighting the newest ways to bend genre practiced by artists working today. The eight featured artists hail from the Ukraine, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and the United States - among others - yet have much to say to each other. The hazy, Impressionistic landscape paintings on one wall seem to both inform and take cues from the brash figural paintings on the next. Mélange of Milieu is unique in the current crop of gallery shows for featuring sculpture as prominently as painting, or indeed any works on paper. The exhibition makes a conscious effort to include a range of three-dimensional works, the result being an unusually revealing look at the field. There are highly realistic bronze figurines of invented animals, sleek and gestural depictions of the moving body in stone, and assemblages of brightly colored wooden blocks that have been both painted and embroidered, in a way, to evoke the patterns of the cosmos.