/ VOICES

With the exhibition VOICES, ALIEN Art is proud to stage the first major retrospective exhibition by the artist Jiro Kamata in Taiwan, who has been engaging in many aspects of “optic experience” that inspired him over the past 20 years. By deploying an array of expressive techniques, dominated by both reflection and communication, Jiro Kamata has carved out a unique position while participating in numerous international shows. The voices that lend the exhibition its name emerge through sound, attitude, identity and expression, and point to an ongoing story that is preserved and continued.

Jiro Kamata was born in 1978 to a family of jewelers in the ancient city of Hirosaki, situated in northern Japan. Despite his family origins, he instinctively resisted going into the jewelry industry. In 2000, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Otto Künzli, who was then recognized for his progressive artistic development. Underlying all his break-through creation is an archeology in which the condensation of special moments – as the macrocosmos – exist through the transformation from each ordinary life into an embrace of all possibilities, combining them with a keen attempt to continue a monumental memory.

ALIEN Art is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists whose works promote a deeper understanding of humankind’s connection with the natural environment. In this project, Jiro Kamata is redefining the featured “value” and “optic” experience, not as traditional set situation of classic jewelry formed by mineral extraction but rather through its preservation. His works are literally confronting visibility, and do not yield to the innate value of material. Conversely, his creations apply objects of the “happened memory” – the remaining object to be turned into a valued work by a progressive attitude. To look at the path of how an object is created and how it links to a body of performance, we would agree that value is reborn by sewing the happened memories together in relationship to the body of their viewer.

The elegant book is designed by Studio Amanda Haas, with publishing assistance by Arnoldsche Art Publishers in Stuttgart, Germany. At last, we are much obliged to our generous sponsors from all the cooperating institutions, individuals and companies, especially Erwin Gisela von Steiner and Kulturreferat der Landeshuaptstadt München, that have so graciously agreed to support in making the exhibition and this publication possible.