2020 About

With original travel plans affected by the pandemic, the 2020 iteration focuses on the underlying concept to reframe the conversation around cultural diegesis in the arts.  The exhibition revisits the concept of shikoukairo – meaning patterns of thought. The 2019 Shikoukairo show introduced the concept to highlight the multiplicities of approaches by Japanese and Japanese American artists outside the archetypal, diegetic confines of the search for cultural identity through art. This year, shikoukairo acquires a new meaning as the artists simultaneously reflect on what it means to make work and how one does so during extended isolation. 

Featuring Chicago-based artists Hua Xi Zi and Jennifer Chen-su Huang, New York-based artist Taro Takizawa, and Kiyomi Negi & Kioto Aoki of AIRMW, 思考回路• Shikoukairo II brings together a group of artists who are intuitively influenced by their diasporic background – yet whose practices employ a rhetoric grounded in visual and conceptual inquiries of material methodologies. The process and material-based works are occipital, tactile and linguistic explorations that try to question and reassess the relationship between body, mind, and our immediate environment of the home, social, and physical space.