Artcourt Gallery presents Edges, an exhibition by the internationally acclaimed contemporary sculptor Yasuaki Onishi (b.1979).
Working with themes of volume, gravity and distance, Yasuaki Onishi has developed a body of works of sculpture that give visual forms to those “negative” spaces that are often referred to as “hollow” or “blank”. Using materials that do not retain shapes easily, such as glue and polyethylene sheeting, he applies a delicate sensibility to trace and contour the forms that lie at the boundary between human agency and nature. This exhibition will focus on the new work edges, and also feature the dramatically unfolding sculpture work inside of volume, and the flat piece plate of traces, which Onishi created with the reversal of front/back and depth as his key concept.


Creation is work that makes current borderlines clear, and renews contours.
I am suggesting systems that go beyond the human hand to trigger the body sensations of sharing a work and a space, and I am exploring ways of knowing this world and its reverse.
Using materials that tend not to retain shapes, I create works that have significant effects on spaces.
They are sculptures that do not point to particular phenomena, but leave much to be interpreted by the viewer.
The countless lines of glue and the air-enveloping membranes of polyethylene sheeting function as a container that stores up my actions, and the effects arising from them, that I have concentrated into the space.
Handling what is “other than it” allows “it itself” to become clearly visible.
By considering its extremities and its opposite side, and supplementing the hollows and voids with imagination, it is possible for a person to find their actual substances on the basis of sparse clues.

Yasuaki Onishi


Work Description;
Bathed in gradations of light as they repeatedly expand and contract – the balloons of Edges. Rather than deriving patterns from particular phenomena, Onishi’s works function as vessels that, in a comfortable manner, upend such concepts as scale and inside/outside and front/back, and store up the viewer’s boundless thoughts and imagination. Onishi is an artist who sculpts the space of display, and who sets up reciprocal relationships that make use of simple components while engaging in careful observation of a place’s defining characteristics. In the experience of surveying the exterior of a work while being enveloped within it, the viewer sometimes gains from the inorganic material a sense of an organic presence; and sometimes there are things of vastness and minuteness conjured up that undergo repeated interplays of dividing and uniting within constantly converting dimensions. The images one obtains from the work evolve with ever-increasing speed, and one’s imagination spreads in all directions.
The soft materials store up the tracks of one’s actions (time), and simultaneously human agency and the invisible presences of gravity/air-current/phenomena persist in vying forms.
A panel covered with glue and then subjected to repeated pressure-bonding, reheating and scratching: plate of traces.
A sculpting of “hollowness” inside a cube, affording various viewpoints: inside of volume. These formations, which are also found manifesting in the wavering presence of reverse of volume with its floating polyethylene membrane hung on countless thin vertical lines, present a new, light-feeling kind of sculpture that treats “emptiness” and “change” as its essence.