Tam Ochiai: Shopping Bag
@ Hans Goodrich
1747 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Saturday, September 20th, from 5 PM - 9 PM
On view through Sunday, November 2nd
Hans Goodrich is elated to present ‘Shopping Bag’, a solo exhibition of paintings dated c. 1992 – 1995 by New York City based artist Tam Ochiai (b. 1967, Yokohama, JP)
Tam Ochiai is an artist whose strength lies in the fragility of his works.
Circumstantially nomadic, Ochiai later took nomadism as the consciously chosen ground of his identity. Growing up in Tokyo in the years of its postmodern excess, Ochiai moved to New York in 1989 following his family. Both art school education and the diversity of artistic styles proliferating in the art world convinced him of the difficulty of being genuinely original at such a late stage in art practice. In order to claim a place in a tradition not his own, Ochiai developed a strategy to turn his latecomer and expatriate position to his advantage. It included modifying American Modernist painting from its residual end, deliberately deploying expendable factors, in order to undermine the priority of artistic autonomy while creating a condition in which irregularities can function as pathways to the new.
The droll mixture of Appropriationist irony and neo-Dada iconoclasm in Ochiai’s early works intone a postmodern lament on the difficulty of originality. In 1993, Ochiai made mock painting surrogates by stretching plastic shopping bags over handmade frames with a thin aperture in the side, garnishing them with tiny brush strokes and single-color squares, which clownishly mimed Abstract Expressionist brush strokes and Color-Field pictorial planes.
While dwarfing the prestige of heroic paintings and fashionable brands, these painting objects also conveyed the artist’s love of the original with sensitive arrangements of details, with every blot functioning as a painterly sign. The fact that such “painterly signs” appeared only near, or on, the edge of his “canvases” wistfully indicated Ochiai’s sense of peripherality.
Ochiai’s works between 1993 and 1996 pursue the task of displacing the formal sensibility of painting in unconventional formats or materials, recapitulating the spirit of “anti-painting” explored in the early works of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.
–Midori Matsui, 2001
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Tags: Chicago, Hans Goodrich, Lower West Side, Shopping Bag, Tam Ochiai
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