To kick off the Project we will be doign a cultural exchange with Japanese artists. This will be a festival type event at several locations in Tokyo, Shiogama and Toronto. Each city will have arranged spaces for the various exhibitions - as no one location can provide the full experience of the showcased artists and their various styles.

The Nature of Things

This event will concist of   three group exhibitions and one solo exhibit entitled "The Urbanized Animal", "The New Look" and "The Concrete Jungle". The series surrounds the theme of the Environment, as it is a theme that is well associated with Canada and one that is of current discussion. The series will underline the overall ideas of how the environment has been changed by us, the internal battle of control between humans and the natural environment, as well as how natural concepts and ideas have evolved throughout or progression in civil society. 

The Youth

Since ancient times in Japan, “spring,” one of the seasons presenting the appearance of the plant life, represents the full of new energies, and juvenescence is represented as “blue.” The Japanese term “the youth” is made of those words “blue” and “spring,” meaning the most galaxy period of life.  

The age span called “the young” in Japan is wider than other countries, and most of the ages are referred to “the young.”  Is that because we conceive fantasy or romanticism in the past of the youth that you cannot physically return?

In this exhibition Japanese artists and writers show and share “the definition of the youth” with the audience in Canada. With “story-telling of the inner mythology by overlapping the poetic and personal texts, decorative, figurate pictures, inflated self-images or heightened reality, just like underground comic and Japanese girl’s “manga”. (Midori Matsui), the exhibiting artists would like to challenge the audience to share the lifetime-youth-spirits.