Nishijin Sky: Teresita Fernandez + Masataka Hosoo Exhibition

Kyoto University of Art & Design

Teresita Fernández "Golden (Onyx Sky)". 2014

This event has ended.

Teresita Fernandez is a contemporary artist who creates large-scale sculptures and site-specific art works in response to landscape and natural phenomena. For this project, Fernandez has collaborated with Masataka Hosoo, the twelfth generation of the Hosoo Family. Founded in 1688, Hosoo specializes in traditional weaving based in Nishijin,Kyoto. Nishijin weavers have historically created Kesa (monks’ garments) and Obi (kimono sashes) by interweaving silk with finely shredded gold-coated Washi (Japanese paper). Today, leading designers all over the world admire Hosoo’s ability to merge traditional weaving with state-of-the-art technology to generate intricate patterns.
For “Nishijin Sky” Fernandez has created a luminous golden landscape that recalls a horizon of rising and falling water surrounded by an atmospheric darkness that recalls cinematic dissolves and film projections. To interpret this image, Hosoo has developed and invented a weaving machine that exists in no other place in the world. The result, a meeting of contemporary art and traditional craft, presents Fernandez’s image as a kinran-donsu textile (thick brocaded satin) that becomes a free-standing landscape sculpture which can be viewed on all side.
The aim of this exhibition is to showcase the unique beauty of the work yielded from the collaboration between diverse fields - a contemporary artist from the United States and a traditional master artisan from Japan - and to encourage viewers to engage in the spirit of experimentation and collaboration between diverse disciplines and cultures.