Resonance from Fragments

aaploit presents Resonance from Fragments, a two-person exhibition by Inui Koutaro and Yasumura Hinako, on view from July 5 through July 21, 2024. The exhibition brings together Yasumura, who creates new forms from flotsam through the technique of kintsugi, and Inui, who explores the act of seeing textile itself.

Yasumura collects objects washed ashore on remote beaches—things that left their owners' hands intentionally or otherwise, drifted across the sea, and came to rest on the shoreline. Their histories are unknowable. Until gathered by the artist, they had been forgotten and abandoned. Having left the lifecycle of useful objects, they drifted and washed ashore unnoticed. Yasumura confronts each piece, finds where one object meets another, and assembles forms in which each element seems to call to the next. These forms are joined through yobitsugi—a kintsugi technique in which a missing fragment of one ceramic vessel is replaced with a fragment from a different vessel, combining unrelated pieces into a single whole. Objects that were originally unconnected generate new forms through relation.

Inui works from the question: what does it mean to look at textile itself? Woven fabric is constructed from warp and weft; knitted fabric from interlocking loops. Textiles are used not only in clothing but in industrial machinery, furniture, interiors, and building materials—yet they are so integrated into daily life that we may only see them without noticing. On canvas, the weave structure foregrounds the linen that normally recedes as support. In silkscreen, Inui uses fine mesh to create intentional clogging, so that even prints from the same plate show different expressions. His practice strips textile of its dress code and asks what becomes visible when that layer is removed.

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of the city of Zaira: the city does not tell its past but contains it, inscribed in the lines of its streets, window grilles, stair rails, and in the scratches, saw marks, chisel cuts, and dents scored upon those surfaces.¹

The marks carved into flotsam by its drifting, the labor embedded in textile, the lines and forms visible on their surfaces—these may be clues that lead us toward the past. This exhibition explores the relationship between objects through the resonance of two different materials: flotsam and textile. Yasumura's practice of finding form in what has washed ashore and Inui's commitment to showing the structure of textile itself offer a new way of seeing the things around us.

¹ Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities. Trans. Yonekawa Yoshio. Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003, p. 17.

For inquiries regarding the exhibition and works, please contact info@aaploit.com.