Sadaharu Horio

Sadaharu Horio
A Trace of Time
Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Hong Kong
04.02 – 11.03.2023

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Sadaharu Horio (1939-2018). It is the gallery’s fifth overall exhibition by the artist and the first since Horio’s passing in November 2018.

Horio was a pioneer in modern Kobe performance art with a significant influence on Japan's contemporary art scene. He worked constantly, often in collaboration with his friends, the so-called “Kuki-team”, which led to an impressive body of performative work. Early in his career, Horio joined the Gutai Art Association in 1966 as one of the group’s third generation members. Throughout his life and work, Horio remained faithful to Gutai’s truly avant-garde spirit, even long after the group disbanded in 1972. Gutai artists had an absolute belief in originality and strived to do what had never been done before, which led to experimental and innovative work.

Horio’s particular practice focused on treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment in a way where he freezes moments in time. In Japanese idiom, this is called ‘ichi-go, ichi-e’, referring to the uniqueness of the moment. Each moment is unique and cannot be reproduced or repeated. The term reminds people to cherish every moment that they may encounter in life. Therefore, he constantly changed his methods, using variable materials like scraps of metal, wood, junk, found objects, and so on. He put together about a hundred exhibitions and presentations per year, which emphasised the idea that exhibiting and performing is rather an extension of his everyday life. In performances, Horio challenged his audience's thoughts on art, deconstructing the concept of a product-based outcome, and enhancing the meaning of critical artistic practice. Horio said: “Everything ordinary or unaffected is basically a performance.”

Horio expressed a great interest in children’s paintings and loved to work with them during his performances. He often said that to achieve the same level of spontaneity, an artist’s psyche must be able to revert to a truly child-like state of wonder — without preconceptions, completely free of fear, unburdened by the ego, and ready to create with ordinary things.

In the last decade of his life, especially after his appearance in Venice at Palazzo Fortuny in 2011, Horio did several performances in Western museums and institutions, like Guggenheim, NY (May 2013) Lille, France (March 2014), Göttland, Sweden (June 2014), Braunschweig, Germany (June 2016), BOZAR Brussels (October 2016).

A few months before his death in June 2018, Horio and the Kuki-team staged what became their final performance at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Kanaal. Utilising the space of empty apartments, they painted on the floor and made monotype prints using the windows as their medium. The five-day performance resulted in many drawings with Chinese ink and watercolour on traditional hand-crafted Japanese Echizen washi paper. The exhibition reveals some of these artworks to the public for the first time. The distinct beauty, unfaltering energy, and swift brushwork that are evident in these works represent artistic expression performed without hesitation.

Another significant part of Horio’s oeuvre is “Ironuri” or “paint placements”. Every day, as an ever-repeating ritual he placed a layer of paint on ordinary, found objects. To avoid making the choice of colour himself, he followed the sequence of colours in the paint box. Thereby, he avoided subjectivity or aestheticisation, because what he did could be done just as well by anyone else and could be endlessly continued.

The exhibition, A Trace of Time, demonstrates the consistency of Horio’s practice through early works from his participation at the Gutai group, later works on paper, “paint placements” created at various performances, and through his monotype prints created during his very last performance at Kanaal. It shows how Horio's unbridled enthusiasm and boundless energy are as inspiring today as when the Gutai group was first founded.