21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

GU Kenryou employs an original technique known as “digital weaving,” in which multiple photographs are woven together at a pixel level to create photographic works with a textural quality resembling fabric, expressing the latent context underlying the images. This exhibition will feature a new series of large-scale photographs taken with a high-resolution camera in forests around the world, including the primeval forests of Fujian Province in China. As a result of their size, the images as a whole are not compressed or reduced to the framework of “flatness,” but rather trigger active movement of the viewer’s eye, evoking the sense of awe experienced and the ghostly murmurs heard in the shadows of a forest. Meanwhile, the artist’s distinctive method of weaving multiple images together manually in repeating rows and columns of pixels, one by one, generates fluctuations on an unconscious level that transcend the artist’s intentions, confining the natural spatial and temporal scale of the earth within the works in a complex fashion. Gu’s art stimulates our common planetary memory, and by imprinting the multi-temporal, multi-lingual, and multi-locational nature of the forest on our minds like an afterimage, brings about changes in the sensibilities of the contemporary viewer paralyzed by an accelerating deluge of visual information.