It is a new year and that means a new round of gallery openings. This year I plan to make a more deliberate effort of attending openings in and around Nagoya. I also plan to make more trips to Tokyo to see the scene there.

Tonight I went to the Noda Contemporary for a solo exhibition of a Kyoto based artist, Yasuka Goto (後藤　靖香). The exhibition titled, Imoarai (芋洗い）literally means potato washing but is also an expression for a crowded group of people. Yasuka Goto, born in Hiroshima, graduated in 2004 with a painting degree from Kyoto Seika University.　She has had two solo shows in Tokyo and some group exhibitions. This exhibition at Noda is her third solo show.

The work in the gallery featured black and white paintings depicting stories her grandfather told her about the war years. Many of the images are banal scenes of soldiers living there lives at a time of war. In one work soldiers sit together before going to bed, in another soldiers all sign their names on a card, and one image depicts two soldiers eating rice. Some of the more haunting images are those of a sea of faces. These images are where the title of the exhibition come from.

The images represent a group of soldiers watching a movie. The flickering light of the projector illuminates their war torn faces. The lines are rough an deliberate instilling the paintings with a specific rawness. I enjoyed these images more than the clean lines of the genre scenes. In one image the perspective is quite naturalistic. This is because it is a rendering of a photograph that her grandfather had. The image titled, From Grandfather’s Picture (伯父の写真より), show two dark skinned men wearing clothes made of ferns and grass. They brandish two sharp blades towards a group of soldiers to the left of the image.

I spoke to the artist for a bit at the end of the exhibtion. I asked her if she had always painted in black and white and she said that she had switched from color about two years ago. Yasuka’s parents attended the show. They said that this was their first experience at an art gallery and they should be very proud.