Several months have now passed since our abilities to move around and have face-to-face communication became immensely restricted by the coronavirus pandemic. People all over the world have spent this time looking back on what they previously took for granted while also contemplating what is to come. Planned during the national state of emergency, this pair of exhibitions is an attempt to discover things about communication and contact with different cultures, and what that communication and contact bring us, in works from the collection of the University Art Museum, Kyoto City University of Arts, and in the current practices and ideas of Kentaro Yokouchi, who completed the doctoral program at the Kyoto City University of Arts Graduate School of Arts.

The University Art Museum features a collection of work by alumni from the Meiji period (1868–1912) to the present. Tracing these artworks in chronological order reveals insights about how artistic expression has shifted with the times. Of particular note among the works in the early period of the collection, we can detect that animals became a common choice of subject following the opening of what is now Kyoto City Zoo in 1903, and the distinct influence of Western-style painting learned from Seiho Takeuchi and other teachers at the university at the time that they had acquired from trips to Europe. The exhibition considers what these “encounters” provided for the artists as well as how they were received in the graduation works of three painters: Hako Irie (1887–1948), Yohei Watanabe (1889–1912), and Kagaku Murakami (1888–1939).

The second floor of the venue features another exhibition, “Kentaro Yokouchi: Something for Everyone.” With a focus on what he calls “cultural grafting,” Yokouchi copies over images from various cultural and historical contexts onto the surface of the painting, and then uses a staining technique soaking paint into the untreated canvas to produce paintings where those images are reconnected. A parallel can be drawn with the way that the Meiji-period artists in the other exhibition were also searching for their forms of expression, which started with learning by copying.

After completing the doctoral program at the Kyoto City University of Arts Graduate School of Arts in 2007, Kentaro Yokouchi worked as an artist for several years in Japan, before moving to Indonesia in 2014. Alongside his research and activities, he opened his home as an art space called Artist Support Project, where he runs projects exploring culture and exchange in a different way than his own painting practice. Wishing to take on the fresh challenges that have emerged from this, he then moved to the Netherlands in spring 2020. This exhibition features work he has created in the various locations of his practice as well as an archive of the Artist Support Project’s activities, presenting a comprehensive view of the ideas behind how Yokouchi has, as an artist, interacted with people and connected with images of products belonging to other cultures.

Our current predicament where we are unable to move around or have face-to-face communication, relying instead almost entirely on online means, is set to continue. The people or world we encounter through the headphones and computer screen in front of us are near and yet far, frequently leaving us more introspective than captivated. It is perhaps precisely because we cannot move around to receive external stimuli, but remain at a standstill, that we turn to examine the things now visible, the things now heard, forming a period of saving up ideas for what is to come. This exhibition hopes to serve as one means of bringing about encounters to store for the future during these times through which we are living.