A private view of this exhibition will be held on 17 March 2022. For more details, please visit the Daiwa Foundation website.

Asako Shiroki’s work appears enigmatically stark in its utilitarian forms and untreated materials. Perhaps confounding at first glance, over time it reveals certain rhythm through repetition and extension. The ‘tempo’ of an object often seems to be based on an alternative standard, as if in anamorphic perspective or viewed from an alternative dimension to the world we live in. Its presence is gentle, co-existing in our environment, invoking familiar forms. Yet in this distorted familiarity lies a disruption of human scales of thinking, evoking a recollection of fragmented memories.

Originally trained in silversmithing, Shiroki moved on to working in wood. She describes this natural material as simultaneously confrontational, adaptable, and a means to explore the temporal process of bringing form to raw material. The performative act of working the wood crystallises in the exhibition space as an installation, choreographed in physical relationships, balance, and tensions between shapes. Shiroki respects the ephemeral nature of reality and how metamorphosis takes place in our environment; she reflects fragility and strength through her practice. Henceforth her works can be dismantled to lie dormant until they are ready to be re-assembled.

One day I was walking on the street, I found the shapes of the twigs charming. As I had one of them in my hand, I spotted a bird’s nest over my head. It was a moment of intervention in a process of rational collection, or of destined accumulation, and it was a moment of discovering passages, and the interweaving of different worlds. The engaging shape of the twig was the connection between autonomous existences. I felt that our human lives coexist with many different layers of the world.

The wind blows in, her first UK solo show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, features the work A twig of interweaving passages, originally commissioned by Schmuck2 in Retschow. This was Shiroki’s first work shown in public space and signalled a new dimension to her practice. Collecting found ephemeral objects from her surroundings – pretzels, feathers, twigs – transformed in bronze, her work allows intervention from nature, but reflects it into an inverse perspective on the world. Requisitioning elements of the constructed environment, the installation develops the artist’s acute sensibility for materials and the exploration of the tension between nature and dwelling. Her work sets an equilibrium to nature, an arbitrary set of standards, recognition, histories, technique or our embedded culture with our perceptions.

About the artist

Asako Shiroki (b. 1979, Tokyo) currently lives and works in Berlin and Tokyo. She completed her PhD in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts and participated in the International Studio Program in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2013-2014).

Her recent exhibitions include PLAY MUSEUM, Schmuck2, Glashagen Hof, Retschow, Germany (2021); A warm trail, M100, Odense, Denmark (2020); Your Voice, Echoed, Cultural Center of Belgrade Art Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia (2019); A room that grows buoyant, 21st DOMANI-The Art of Tomorrow, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2019); Neighborhood Seen through Art, Community Engagement Program, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2018); The Other Face of the Moon, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea(2017); The Pleasure of Love, 56th October Salon, Belgrade City Museum, Serbia (2016); Contiguous notes, Japanisch-Deutsches Zentrum Berlin (2016); Expanding and condensing, Pola Museum Annex, Tokyo (2015); On the floor, Behind the window, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014); A Time for Dreams, the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, The Museum of Moscow, Russia (2014). She received the Cultural Centre of Belgrade Award (2016). Her catalogue On the Floor, Behind the Window was published by Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014).