New York, NY – Superchief Gallery proudly presents Something Ambiguous, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptural work by Japanese artist Ya Maeda opening on Thursday, May 6, 2021. This show, which serves as his second outing with the gallery, speaks to the artist’s desire to create through intuitive means, leaving behind something cryptic, indeterminate, and unidentifiable.
Pulling from his Japanese cultural heritage and principles of Buddhism, Shintoism, and Animism, Maeda immerses viewers within a vibrant yet nebulous realm of mandalas, free-floating light bulbs, and metamorphosising abstractions.
Infused with psychedelic and folk art motifs, the artist cites his lived experiences in America and his home country as equal influences, and while concurrently finding strength in the Western ideals of individualism and traditional Japanese principles of social unity, he shuns the concept of nationalism.
However his artistic practice never becomes overtly political. Maeda embraces altered states of consciousness over any concrete reality, deconstructing each of his subjects into an ecosystem of geometric shapes and patterns, governed by striking color-schemes and mediative optics. Maeda deliberates over each work as a sum of its parts, grappling larger conversations about reconnection with the natural world, and how to achieve balance through heightened awareness of the individual parts that comprise a cohesive whole.
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