24 August 2018

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Yuree Kensaku is a celebrated Japanese-Thai artist whose exuberant candy-coloured works of virtuoso surrealism draw on pop iconography, contemporary Thai politics, and her own allergies and anxieties. They seem at times nightmares dressed up as kitsch, or a kind of sugar-coated horror show of contemporary culture. By BKKLIT TEAM

They seem at times nightmares dressed up as kitsch, or a kind of sugar-coated horror show of contemporary culture.  In interview Yuree Kensaku is calm, articulate and unprepossessing, giving explanations of her work in simple, almost guileless phrases that suddenly snap into hard focus. Her creations, like her, can catch you off-guard. They are deceptively simple – almost throwaway because of the flat, cartoon style she adopts – but there is an insidiousness in the detail. There are jarring acts of violence, lascivious tongues, dead-looking eyes, and a cast of sinister characters.  She lifts the lid in unsettling glimpses, or picks away at the scab to show something raw and tender beneath – things that, in the real world, are glossed over, not mentioned, or denied.

Her methods are accomplished and innovative, and her impressive range of techniques – which result from a restless need to experiment – are used to equally good effect. She has produced collage, murals, video installations, animation, music, and sculpture. For her most recent exhibition in Bangkok, Atmosfear, she turned her personal fears and anxieties into vivid wall-to-wall cartoon murals steeped in her particular brand of faux-kitsch humour. At Hong Kong’s 2015 Art Basel, she exhibited the powerful When the Elephants Fight, the Grass Gets Trampled, an allegorical piece she has described as portraying the pernicious effects of the political rift in Thailand. Two powerful elephants with red eyes clash under a lurid orange sky while an Hieronymous Bosch-like nightmare of animal violence takes place in the background with weak animals crushed and buffaloes burning on the horizon. It is a tour-de-force – perhaps her best, certainly most serious, work so far. 

Despite only being in her mid-thirties Yuree Kensaku has exhibited widely and has work in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum, the Mori Art Museum, and the Yokohama Museum of Art. She is represented in Bangkok by the 100 Tonson Gallery.

BKKLIT: What was the first thing you remember making that you would call “art”?

YK: When I was young I liked to play with coloured pencils. It was one of the things I really liked to do and when I grew older I always chose subjects that related to art at school like interior design or music and eventually I decided to pursue a degree in visual arts at university. There was a piece I did in painting class where we were asked to paint a still life – mine wasn’t proportionally correct plus I used high-contrast colors to create the form. We were taught to paint realistically; I felt like that piece was the first time I was making something different. 

Read more: https://bkklit.com/yuree-kensaku/

SOURCE: The BKKLIT  (www.bkklit.com)