At the end of the summer, the night after we opened our exhibition, The Unibrow Show, in Tokyo, a few of us took the train to Kamakura, Japan to visit with Yusuke Hanai. We were getting a preview of what would be his then upcoming solo show, Perseverance at Pace Prints, but also there was a deeper reason for why we wanted to go: we wanted to see how much his work was intertwined, in the DNA, of the town. Yusuke has two studios there, one for his larger works and the other more of his surf shack, illustration and design based space. At the edge of Sagami Bay, an hour south of Tokyo, he tucks himself away in a surf shack on most mornings and into the mountains on many afternoons to work.
There is a piece of Yusuke everywhere here; an internationally known and renowned artist in the place where his characters are born and brought to life, becoming part of the visual landscape. And through our time there, we began to see how his relationship with Jean Jullien, the Paris-based artist who has memorialized his own time in Tokyo and Kamakura in his solo show, Return to Tokugawa Village, at Alice Gallery in Brussels. Because of their ability to draw and design, and then paint and create exhibitions, both artists navigate the art world in similar ways. They leave a piece of themselves everywhere they go.
Many who know me know I have been examining and writing so much recently on the over-exhausted conversations of art markets, with so many talking heads inputing more and more content into the endless stream of wispy nothingness of art dialogue. Yusuke and Jullien should be a reminder of what art can be and where it can be. It struck me at the launch of the magazine, both artists flipping through the magazine and both artists exhibiting in The Unibrow Show; these are two of the reasons why I love trying to talk about this bridge between high and low. They are both painting and creating in their own artistic language across a large range of mediums and surfaces.
Both the shows in NYC and Brussels come from Japan, and come from both’s own personal interpretation of home and the passing of time. They both paint and draw memories that feel universal.
When we sat on top of a mountain with Yusuke on the humid, cloudy September day, I wrote “On a clear day, you can see Mt Fuji in the distance, but on this cloudy, late summer afternoon, you can only see the gray of the sea blending into the sky.” A few months later, Jean Jullien would paint that same view, with a clear sight of Mt Fuji, a place Yusuke took him as well. It felt like the circular nature of friendship and companionship playing out in fine art. For some reason, it felt historic. —Evan Pricco
