KYNE SHANGHAI 2022
Japanese Painting, Graffiti, and 1980’s Popular and Contemporary Mash-up Culture
Seeminglydisparate elements attain a fine integration in paintings by KYNE. As a student of Japanese painting at university, KYNE studied the masters,
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KYNE, 700x500x300mm,Bronze, 2022.
Compared with Japan’s long tradition of painting, graffiti is temporal and instantaneous. By simultaneously developing these two traditions—that of the old and new,KYNE’sart practise moved along a unique creative trajectory. The artist has also been heavily influenced by 1980’s iconology, music and popular culture. Utopian stories unfold in the artist’s two-dimensional album cover and comic book artworks. These elements combine to produce a nostalgic and paradigmatic ‘feeling for those days.’This ‘feeling’ lingers in our hearts for many years, and the ‘atmosphere’ conveyed by this ‘feeling’ is something that fails to transmit through browsing online archival images or text.
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KYNE, 116.7 × 116.7, Acrylic on canvas, 2022.
KYNE’s female portraits break with Japan’s traditional painting as well as graffiti.These portraits of women convey the artist’s subjective and temporal experience of culture. As we ask ourselves about the origins of artistic inspiration, we see in some cases a cultural rejuvenation, but note that this otherwise linear progression is interrupted by the artist’s more idiosyncratic tendencies.KYNEdescribes themselves as being born to some extent in virtual spaces as well as on the streets. Neither a complete homebody or a street kid, the artist carves out a unique space composed of both worlds. In new works on exhibition at this show, we are drawn to the KYNE models, girls who pose now more than ever.
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162 diameter, Acrylic on canvas, 2022.
We clearly see these models in paintings, who are aware they are ‘here,’ posing and voguing as we follow their line of sight, looking for the camera’s lens. We feel acutely the awareness of a KYNE model, very different from most women rendered in paintings. These models focus right ‘here,’ looking into the eye of the artist, or sometimes they stare into the lens of a camera(SNS). We feel the self-consciousness of these woman pointed straight at the ‘other.’
Unlike the confident stare of Andy Warhol or the gentle gaze of Alex Katz models,KYNE models exhibit a relationship among themselves,giving us a new experience of the model already in-relationship, before us. These surface-like portraits of seemingly non-special women depict the artist’s own cultural experience. We gain a sense of the artist’s taste for a restitution of the times, rendered as mashed-up modernity.