The Daiwa Foundation is delighted to present Erase and See, an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Sumi Kanazawa. Through an understanding of the contradictions and discrepancies that characterise our past and present, Kanazawa suggests ways of being more imaginative about how to live now, to problematise distinctions conventionally drawn between individuals, politics and society, between public and private identities. This is exemplified by her Drawings on Newspapers, showcased here. Like a star-spangled night sky, this large-scale installation radiates the kind of information that floods the world, counteracted through artistic intervention.

Kanazawa uses a black 10B pencil to obliterate printed words and images in newspapers, except for those that appeal to her, either for a reason or intuitively. The remaining content is thus excised from its context to weave new stories. For Kanazawa, the erasure of context is a liberating experience, pointing up the discrepancy between an individual’s sense of time and that regulated by society. In this way, her work constitutes an idiosyncratic overview of a social context from the delimited space within which an individual exists. Significantly, Kanazawa creates her work at night, during 10pm-3am, when most people are fast asleep. Her time-consuming artistic process goes against the grain of modern mass- and social-media, encouraging us to slow down and break free.

This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Delfina Foundation and the Contemporary Art Foundation Japan.

About the contributors