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| For this exhibition titled ‘Yuurei’, NISHIO will
present rather elegant ghosts; a girl pensively floating in front
of a Buddhist alter, a girl in boots striking a pose in a western
house. Unlike the standardized Japanese "Ghost paintings (so-called
Yuurei-ga)", which legless and decomposing, float around oozing
a grotesque aura, NISHIO’s Ghost-Yuurei painting seem to possess
the confidence of having found eternal youth, and flaunts this by
posing and dressing beautifully. In fact their confidence and vivaciousness,
becomes oppressively confrontational to us, on this side, perhaps
because they seem more alive than us even though dead. These ‘gaps’
between the dead and living, are chillingly and beautifully bridged
by his renderings in sumi-ink, adding a new style of ‘Ghost painting’
to this tradition. |
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