Ryusei Nakajima “I Trust Your Story”

LAG（LIVE ART GALLERY）is pleased to announce the exhibition “I Trust Your Story” by Ryusei Nakajima from Friday, September 13, 2024 to Saturday, September 28, 2024.
In 2022, at just 17 years old after Nakajima dropped out of high school, he won the Aya Takano Award at GEISHA#21, one of the gateways to accessing contemporary art, after that, he held a solo exhibition at Hidari Zingaro and took part in various art projects, and his works has been presented in multiple forms, including paintings and poetic texts, inspired by his awareness of the matter in the digital domains as the staring point for these works.
His strange student era under the circumstances due to the pandemic, accepting the culture online mingled reality and virtual, and through all of these, he felt the impossibility of sharing with others in the clipping social structure, and as a means to break through this sense of entrapment, he becomes having the belief of the power of narratives which have the potential to reveal a world beyond fiction and reality.
In this exhibition, his experienced caregiving of hearing the story of daydreaming from his grannie with dementia, his encounter with an illustrator Seitaro Kuroda, and his resonance with storytelling of Japanese traveling entertainers and legends of blind people, while touching these various ways of the contexts, the exhibition will feature paintings created by weaving stories of his daily events and sometimes fantasies.
We hope you will take this opportunity to see and enjoy the exhibition.

—Artist Statement—

I was sent off to the “resumption of daily life” with the title call of a newspaper reporter holding a camera in the corner of a shoe locker, but upon the destruction or modification of the existing reality by the pandemic, before I was playing an online game while back-to-school, now the situation has been changing as if the online game is equal to school, under the circumstance, I was sent off to the “resumption of daily life” with the title call of a newspaper reporter holding a camera in the corner of a shoe locker, but upon the destruction or modification of the existing reality by the pandemic, before I was playing an online game while back-to-school, now the situation has been changing as if the online game is equal to school, under this circumstance, I am embedded in the dynamics to ensure its interpretability, and as a matter of fact, I am forced to make a new departure from the social consensus of the resumption before I try to approach the meaning of interpretation freely to the reality that virtualized from this side. Since the same period, I have mimicked my dissociation into a thumbnail’s potential that reflects diverse variations, attracting interpretive proposals as if this was the moment I’ve been waiting for. I have been attempting to send and receive them as content inside and out of digital platforms. But I went through it all, and rather than facing my never-finished interpretive sent around reality, by doing so to refuse to be noticed, I began to think more about the loss of reality.
 
Anyway, I don’t know why I encountered a “story” and have been listening to it. For instance, one such example is accompanying my grannie with dementia as she spins a rambling narrative about a reality that she can’t remember anymore. It is a play of self and death in the only belief defeat of the inability to break through the interpretations of life, and It is also an act of evoking a sense that she has gone through exactly what has happened so far. And she said, I’ve been alive this way as you can see for a long time. We are both frightened when the sluggish life wobbles toward us, covering an expanse of absolute darkness that transcends the blindness of an era, and we both smile and seem to rejoice at that moment when we are frightened and left under the darkness with a hint of eternal defeat and are being blind by both defeats. Perhaps it’s because we sense the sign of an encounter.
 
We are both frightened when the sluggish life wobbles toward us, covering an expanse of absolute darkness that transcends the blindness of an era, and we both smile and seem to rejoice at that moment when we are frightened and left under the darkness with a hint of eternal defeat and are being blind by both defeats. Perhaps it’s because we sense the sign of an encounter. To be led to a story where the dropouts entrust with each other’s sorrows is to receive a blessing strangely, not unlike the disconnected outburst of a 17-year-old who vented his disbelief and anger at being set up in the resumption of the age.
 
At just that brief moment, according to the work of humans living a terrifyingly long and lasting sorrow, we can feel the countless “stories” in the darkness, and the virtual and fiction surmount themselves and might have already acquired the media that connects to another lasting set of eyes or the land. Therefore, my humanistic actings are a blatant lie that has repetitions of reality and is locked out freely, and it’s just pie in the sky to accept it and make a sad confession. At just that brief moment, according to the work of humans living a terrifyingly long and lasting sorrow, we can feel the countless “stories” in the darkness, and the virtual and fiction surmount themselves and might have already acquired the media that connects to another lasting set of eyes or the land. Therefore, my humanistic actings are a blatant lie that has repetitions of reality and is locked out freely, and it’s just pie in the sky to accept it and make a sad confession. What’s more, I always slip through the darkness without my mind, and once again, all by myself, I can see the light reflected powerfully. At that moment, I was keenly aware of my second, and most disgracefully total defeat. It seems like I am living in a tiny time where I can only think I know what I’m talking about without getting there, and when I reveal my dishonesty to shoot through the moment and moment, I immediately stumble back, then pull out my narrative, and try to respond to it.

Ryusei Nakajima