Takuya Inoue

November, 2024

Takuya Inoue (b.1993) is a Japanese painter exploring the 'universality' of all phenomena. As part of his observations, he spends his daily life traveling to different places. He immerses himself in the changing landscapes, climates, people and cultures of everyday life and uses this as a motivation to paint his feelings, thoughts and values, which are also changing. Inoue completed his MFA at Tokyo University of Art in 2021. His activities are supported by cultural grants such as the Ishibashi Foundation (2019), Nomura Foundation (2022) and other activities and residencies in various parts of Japan, Finland and China, and is realized in connection with the people he meets in those places. Previous exhibition includes installations using natural light changing from morning to night as the axis, such as "STRIKE ME PINK!" (Japan, 2018) and "Me?" (Japan, 2021), and "Children in Mother" (Japan, 2021), a group of works drawn during a year's journey, in which the work continues to change in time. The work is an attempt to expose the existence of things that continue to change in time and things that remain unchanged in the repetition of that change.

"In recent years, I have been interested in depicting 'human universality' and have been looking at the 'self' as an object of observation. I believe that everyone has a self, and therefore thinking about the self is also thinking about others, in other words, the universality of human beings. For me, painting is an act of melting the boundary between self and other. It means contrasting and clarifying these entities through painting, and at the same time blurring them. Painting has existed throughout human history and will continue to exist in the future. My painting is also bound by others in the past, and at the same time it is bound by others in the future. In the same way, the self is part of and in the process of being between the past and the future other. My ideal is to be part of the human universality by equating self and others in a limited amount of time. And surely it is the same for everyone."