Kyoko Imazu

Revelling at once in both pointed personality and dreamlike ambivalence, Kyoko Imazu's media- and genre-hopping show, Hiding Spots, elides between the sensed and the imagined.

A feline figure looks us almost in the eye in Beetle Spotting, 2018. Offering this slant gaze at once curious and evasive, the cat’s face is captivating – their whiskers tremulous and sensitive against a “featureless” background. Refusing to offer either geographical or perspectival specificity, this washed background strikes against the intense and textured particularity of the cat, which appears as a character warmly seen or remembered even in the abstracted field of the image. Below, a wonderland world of playful scalar disarray swarms with detail: a large, dark beetle occupies the middle ground, while shrunken human figures are at some mysterious day-to-day work amongst the grasses and leaves. The sharp lines of the work’s etching are cloaked in a rippling wash of colour. Character sings staunchly from the picture’s land of in-between. 

Imazu’s Hiding Spots sets these fine-grained particulars – whiskers, horned beetles, mundane gestures by costumed people – within settings woven from memory, imagination, and play. Often, characters from Imazu’s childhood in Japan are set within Australian or otherwise ambivalent landscapes: the artist’s work here is to modulate between times, places, and expressive registers with a grounding in remembered or sensed material. There is a certain kind of magic attending to this work. Elements of “personality” flicker and shift through gauzy dreamscapes, as solid figures – often drawn at once from both the artist’s memories, and her present surroundings, within the same image – are sifted out of the intermediate realm of the visually non-specific. This is the magic of Imazu’s special attentiveness to the teeming biological world around her – but also to its imaginative and affective valences. In many of Imazu’s images, we find often-overlooked members of our surrounds. We see weeds, bugs, and pebbles that are so frequently shrunk back from the centre of or preoccupied and anthropocentric gaze. 

Just as the settings of Imazu’s prints might be described as an “in-between,” so too might we consider her approach to medium as modular. Hiding Spots presents work across printmaking, papercut, and ceramics, with characters and moods carrying across between these distinct modes of making. Many of the ceramics in the show extrapolate upon characters from the prints: horned beetle figures with human-like faces, cats, and multi-species characters simply designated as “strange animals.” There is, in these ceramics, a frequent emphasis on companionship, or even friendship, between species, as human figures are shown embracing, or “leaning upon” other creatures, both literally and symbolically. Is in, indeed, as if these creatures (including human creatures) look each other in the eye, whichever world they may be found within. 

EXHIBITION
Kyoko Imazu: Hiding Spots
8 – 26 March 2022, with artist talk 26 March
Australian Galleries, Melbourne