Aiko Tezuka

Aiko Tezuka

Japan/Germany

 

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1976, Aiko Tezuka currently lives in Berlin, Germany and mainly active in Berlin and Tokyo.

In 2001, Aiko Tezuka completed the Master’s Degree programme in Painting at Musashino Art University, Tokyo (studied under sculptor Shigeo Toya). In 2005, she completed PhD in Painting at the Art Research Department of Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan (studied under painter Keiji Usami). From 2010 to 2011, Aiko Tezuka lived and worked in London, UK, supported by the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Foundation. Then she began to live in Berlin (2011), with the support of a fellowship from the Japanese Government’s Overseas Study Program for Artists. In 1997, Aiko Tezuka embarked on a type of work that unravels readymade fabric. She has continued to create new structural forms through referring to and editing historical objects, using unique methods of her own. Recent exhibitions: The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Fukuoka Art Museum; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art; Textiel Museum (Netherlands); Johann Jacobs Museum (Switzerland); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (Seoul, Korea); and many others.

Certainty / Entropy (Japan 6)

Unravelled fabric designed by the artist with coloured warp threads, Wooden frames

200 x 208.5 x 2 cm(installation size);130 x 208.5 x 2 cm(work size ),fabric length 260cm

 

The Certainty/Entropy series was produced specifically for Aiko's solo exhibition held at Hermes Singapore in 2014. She designed these four kinds of textiles, which were hand-woven by professional craftworkers in the textile museum called ‘Textile Laboratory’ in Tilburg, a southern region of the Netherlands. Aiko had long dreamt about designing pieces of fabric herself. The reason for this is that it would highlight the paired notions of ‘disassembly and rebuilding,’ which are the conceptual pillars of her work.

The fabric of Certainty / Entropy (Japan 6) refers to Stand cover (kyokechi-dyed fabric) in the 8th century in Japan and contemporary symbols are sprinkled over the traditional fabric as a part of flowers. The contemporary symbols that are surrounding us in society are quoted from copyright mark, @ mark, nuclear symbol, bio mark, peace mark, credit card company symbols, gene image, irradiated mark, placenta image, womb image, biohazard mark, etc. These modern symbols are woven into the layer in which the past and modern signs are intertwined to weave a piece of fabric, and in the end, it was unravelled.

Aiko has been examining the ancient, pre-modern and contemporary worlds through the media of textiles and their patterns. However, the issues of conflicting desires and the often-untold labour of slaves are universal and timeless for humanity as a whole. Even though all craftsmen that designed and wove the fabrics she used in this project are long gone, Aiko would like to continue thinking about them and perhaps even empathising with them. From the experience of conducting this research, she decided to interweave the threads of old fabrics and contemporary symbols in order to weave her own fabric.

And as the fabric was unravelled yet again by the hands of the author, such as Aiko herself, cultures of the past and the present started melting into one another. The result eventually became the fabric of her own and perhaps even our time. And one day, someone finds it long after the author is dead and may imagine the time that she has lived. Aiko likes old tapestries and figurines displayed in museums and books, as they invite her into the worlds in which their authors lived and breathed.

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