Statement
About my recent solo exhibitions at Lina Gallery in South Korea.
Solo exhibitions
『Blue Blue Bear and Green, Blue Blue Bear and Sea』
Yasuhito Kawasaki’s work begins with self-portraiture, yet his gaze does not remain fixed on a singular self. The figures in his work are both forms derived from the artist himself and embodiments of others. These beings, bearing similar faces and expressions, form a tranquil, fairy-tale-like world that gently blurs the boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, reality and imagination.
The exhibition 《Blue Blue Bear and Green, Blue Blue Bear and Sea》, held simultaneously at Lina Gallery in Seoul and Busan, revolves around the recurring motif of the ‘Blue Bear’ The exhibition title poses the question, “To whom do the blue sea and green nature truly belong?” Emerging from the recognition that the sea, mountains, rivers, forests, and the Earth’s natural world are not the exclusive property of humankind, this question quietly invites viewers to reconsider the human-centered order of the world.
The artist began working on this exhibition in late 2025. At the time, news reports in Japan frequently covered bears appearing in human living areas and causing damage. However, Kawasaki questioned narratives framed solely from a human perspective. The starting point of this body of work was the question of whether today’s situation was created by humans planting only certain species of trees to expand their settlements, while gradually diminishing the fruits that serve as food for animals and the natural environment itself. Furthermore, hearing that a river had been granted legal “sovereignty” and could no longer be recklessly developed solely for human benefit led him to contemplate whether nature itself might also be regarded as an entity equal to humankind.
Various motifs appear throughout his work, centered around the Blue Bear, including apples, birds, a boy, a girl, and a tiger. Rather than functioning as fixed symbols with singular meanings, these images operate as mediators that layer sensation, memory, and thought. The apple, which repeatedly appears in his work, was initially treated as a symbol of wisdom. Over time, however, the artist began to question humanity’s tendency to assign meaning and reason to everything. After encountering Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 『The Savage Mind』, he began to question the very act of “thinking” itself, and the apple came to symbolize a sensibility that exists before explanation or judgment, as well as an impulse to act first.