We are pleased to announce that gallery UG Tennoz will hold the exhibition entitled, "SWEETS UTOPIA" by Osamu WATANABE from December 13 to December 28.
As a leading artist who has sublimated sweets decorating into an art form, WATANABE has been creating his "fake sweets" works and exhibiting them in various places.
WATANABE has been introducing his works through numerous exhibitions in Kagoshima where it's famous as the birthplace of confectionery sweets in Japan, and other places in the past year. These experiences made him reconsider the significance of sweets and art and viewers will get to see his own utopia in this solo exhibition.
It will be the last exhibition of gallery UG in 2022.
Please come see and enjoy.
ーgallery UG
”Culture and art, it's powerless when it comes to life and death boundaries. They could never be a direct force like medicine or welfare. However, just as art has always existed in people's lives since ancient times as an object of prayer or as spiritual support, it is the time again that art provides the inherent support for living. Utopia is a world that will never exist anywhere else, but picturing and desiring it, that is what leads us to the future. This is precisely the point where Watanabe has chosen the word "utopia" for this exhibition.”
(Excerpts from the text contributed for the solo exhibition)
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Yumiko Nonaka
”In the year 2020, with the virus crisis that attacked evenly to something little to bigger, for richer and to the poorer, all of the world equally struggled. People have kept praying and believing that there would be something beyond the soul of prayer.
Despite their prayers to God, the virus has never stopped. And with the current tragic wars, major disasters, and an unprecedented economic recession in the country, people have realized that there is no salvation. We all had to face the reality.
In the ancient years long time ago, "Tang confectionery" which translated into the word "Chinese sweets creators" was introduced along with Buddhism, and "Nanban confectionery," which was the foundation of Western confectionery, was then introduced from Europe along with Christianity.
Precious confections were dedicated to the Gods and Buddha, and became a spiritual connection between people and the gods and Buddha.
When we unravel the mythology, we find in the Chronicles of Japan that confectionery was brought back from the everlasting land created by the Gods. Sweets were not taken as foods for living, but as an existence that transcended the time axis of human beings.
Arts, sweets, and religions may not actually be of any resolution but the world without them at all, would be very blank.
A world where prayer rituals and heart-enriching sweets exist, though not necessarily necessary but I Osamu WATANABE suggest that a co-existing world might be the utopia to which all religions aspire.
In the reality where there is no resolution, I created my own utopia by piling up all the decorations one by one with a feeling of "praying". Because it is impossible to realize.”
―Osamu WATANABE
