I have posted the troubling phenomenon of MZ-gen arts in nowadays' Korea and perhaps in Asia, too. At least, that was the MZ-gen arts until I knew Etsu Egamy.
Etsu Egamy is a quite young artist from Japan (she was born in 1994), but who is already a household name in the global art scenes. Together with her parents, she began to move around the world in her early childhood. She had to spend her time as a child in the US and later she moved to Germany and then to China to study art. Her tie to her mother tongue was uprooted in early days of her life and she was repeatedly thrown into foreign environments where communicating with others in the languages that she were not able to fully understand became the reality for her.
Thus, Egamy’s art is said to grapple with the theme of human communication. To be more precise, it is the theme of the limit of human communication but also its potential at the same time. On this cue, many unscrupulous critiques do hyperbolic readings of Egamy’s arts. Below is one such example from a Chinese critique.
“Etsu’s creation is about the concept and the significance of ‘communication’. Through the paintings and videos which embodies these mishearing games, as well as the evolution of times, the clashes between civilizations, we acquire a discourse on the barriers in language communications, and subsequently even trigger a crisis.”
But, Egamy’s arts are by no means about 'clashes between civilizations', 'crisis', insurmountable 'barriers to communication' even though it is understandable that such apocalyptic thinking dominates the minds of the more politically aware Chinese critiques.
Rather, a curator from Pompidou Art Center does justice to Egamy’s art when she said:
“I saw all these specificities as a source, not only of misunderstanding, but also of creation and richness in people’s relationships.”
Egamy’s art is totally different from the usual characters of the MZ-gen arts today. Even to those who are familiar with the variety of styles in the modern art, Egamy comes like an instant eye-opener. Her artworks are so fluently created. In fact, they look so effortless that they seem to have been created overnight. Yet, the power and the profundity it carries is striking. When you face her massive brushstrokes on an imposing canvas, the painting begins to be even overwhelming. The movements on the canvas are light and fast, but the impacts are thick and the aesthetics are heavy.
(To be continued)
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