One of the most notable artists of the third generation of Japanese postwar contemporary art scene, Etsu Egami investigates the barriers of communication, deploying a plural work spanning from sound and voice recordings, films and painting, bringing the art of portraiture into a completely new dimension. Born in 1994, in Chiba, Japan, and having spent part of her youth in the United States before studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China and the University of Art and Design (HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany, her experience of an eternal foreigner became the backbone of an artistic practice at the crossroads of several languages and cultures. From her transitory experiences, she realized that “language can only be felt, but not explained” and that “humans communicate with each other, not to get closer, but rather to evaluate their distances”. That fundamental gap has become her path to delve into the nature of the human condition. In the places where her mother tongue is neither spoken nor understood, she came up against the inability to communicate, but she also discovered infinite possibilities. Her anthropological investigation results in a gallery of portraits of individuals that she invites to feel the same state of confusion. In fact, sharing her own experience is a prerequisite to the act of painting.    

Her work This is not a Mis-hearing game (2016), still in progress, testifies to the obsession with portraiture that prevails today, and to the exacerbation of its social role to the point that it has become nothing more than a mask hiding one’s true identity in the era of selfies and social networks. Her work speaks of the “cryptogeneration” to which she belongs, haunted by the narcissism of its own image. Millennials have lived the transition from before to after the Internet. Between virtuality and reality, feelings of social distancing and uncertainty have emerged on both sides of the globe. Their lives are the object of a permanent documentation. There is continuity and rupture with this logic in the work of Etsu Egami which visualizes the process of communication itself, its relationship to the other, as the foundation of all social communication. Recently, in the wake of the pandemic, she started focusing on the way communication becomes more complex in view of the diversity of human exchanges, accentuated by social distancing. Through a serial practice of portraiture, she intends to reflect human diversity, and how to coexist in a socially, politically and culturally divided world.   

Focusing on faces, Etsu Egami undertakes to work with a fluctuating, unstable, infinitely varied matter, which acts as a substitute of the whole individual. To take an interest in the face is to glimpse the ways in which individuals represent themselves and, consequently, the paradigms accompanying the evolution of the conceptions that individuals have of themselves and of the world. As society is defined first and foremost by the idea it has of itself, the face is a privileged medium for projecting and retaining the sensibility that is contemporary with it. The face is an incomplete and temporary unveiling of the person. It is not for oneself, but for the other. Every face has its own silent language but it is also the most alive and sensitive part of the body that willingly or not, we present to others.    

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Egami Etsu breaks the illusionism. Her instantaneous and vigorous brushstrokes assemble in a construction of horizontal lines and rich colored bands. Depending on the angle of view, the position of the viewer, the subject of the painting remains uncertain. The eye must accommodate itself, wanders and creates its path in the painting to recompose the human figure. She works on the modalities of appearance of the image, creates a “glitch”, a visual white noise in her blurred portraits. They are affected by pixel deterioration just as computer-generated images, encrypted, just like linguistic understanding. Through the blurred treatment of the image, she simultaneously evokes the digital data that penetrate the natural world, attesting to an increased porosity between the virtual and the real that governs social life. The digital tools are an expansion of vision in a world saturated with images and the emergence of new images from artificial intelligence and the popularization of social networks. Each era models the body and the processes of psychic and collective individuation according to the technology at its disposal and the ideologies that pass through it. In our current era, the face has entered an economy of flux, circulation and duplication. It has become the emblem of self-recognition, a source of emancipation but also of voluntary submission to various social rules. If each portrait remains strictly isolated, a universe of its own, without any attempt to merge or to get closer to the other, the colors of the rainbow that unite them and recur from one canvas to the other are a recognition of the diversity of the humankind. From grey and pastel washes to rainbow colors, a symbol of hope, her portraits pave a universal while very diverse path for human communication and coexistence.    

But what is particularly brilliant about her oil portrait practice is that her process and aesthetics cannot be reduced the medium of painting itself. She expresses her willingness to go back to the origin of the ancient tradition of painting, to better penetrate the essence of human beings, except that, for her, portraiture is the materialization of sound, voice and people’s expressions. To realize a portrait, she engages in a methodical process at the intersection of hearing and seeing. She submits her models to listening to foreign languages while painting their facial features when trying to decipher. Her Mis-hearing game induces active listening, but a deliberately erroneous understanding. She examines how the different senses connect, collaborate or even communicate with each other through cognitive processes. Etsu Egami reveals the individuals in a moment of misunderstanding, when all the masks fall, and intuitive and intimate expressions resurface. There is no more mask, only the truth of the person is expressed.   

Language exists before us. We are totally immersed in language. We integrate it into a social process. Etsu Egami works on that rift. She reveals how language is a transaction between the world of perception, the cognitive world of the individual, one’s dispositions, memories and culture, but also how artistic experience is a language itself. She points the fracture of the loss of reference points, of the impossibility of a dialogue. Each individual projects by anticipation a horizon of understanding. The brain of the human being solicits the same areas to understand reality, to speak or to exchange in its mother tongue. When one is led to learn a foreign language, the areas solicited are no longer the same. The same goes for the interrelations and neuronal connections that are being created. The individual has to modify entire his own cognitive system. That’s why for Etsu Egami, misunderstanding is an integral part of communication. In an intercultural context as hers, misunderstanding is omnipresent.   

In fact, the plurality of languages is destabilizing. In the myth of Babel, that diversity was already perceived as an obstacle to the unity of human discourse and to free communication between men. There is a gap, an unspeakable distance at the moment of rushing towards the unknown, towards what is other to us. The mind is active, it gropes, it tries to contain reality, to decipher and enter into an understanding, but each language is its own world. Painting is a language in itself, which is not the object of a transparent translation and communication but a matter of interpretation and reception. Just as language, it has a communicative logic and multiple meanings. For Jacques Derrida, the meanings of the work of art are unlimited and he acknowledges the misunderstanding in his theories of interpretation. Among the many neologisms attached to the name of the philosopher, differance is one of the best known. For Derrida, to whom Etsu Egami often refers, differance is unthinkable and infinite. Its trace being buried, erased, forgotten, we can only name it from the trace left by its erasure or by the chains of other words that it has produced. It has never been inscribed in any language. No word can summarize it. Then for Derrida, to speak is to make a “detour” through what is inscribed in language, but also what is not inscribed in it: the differance. It is to break into the self-enclosure of language, to welcome an incomprehensible “guest” who obliges, sooner or later, to speak otherwise. What Etsu Egami tries to make us aware is that true communication is about exposing oneself to someone who is completely different, and not being afraid to change in return. For that, one’s need continuing to deal with discomfort and heterogeneity, to open up completely to others… Etsu Egami’s portraits deal with that specific awareness of the world and of ourselves, which is not simply given, but must always be reconquered. Language throws us out of ourselves, into the real world and towards others. It throws us into disorientation and a battle of words that we must consent to lose into to better find our way. From interaction to coexistence, from grey zones to rainbow irradiation, from mutations to evolution, digital to analog, she paints that unbridgeable distance of the ambiguity of language and among individuals.   

- Jérôme Sans, 2021  

About Artist   

Etsu Egami (b. 1994 in Tokyo, Japan), graduated with a B.F.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) specializing in Oil Painting in 2016. She graduated with an M.F.A. at CAFA under the mentor of artist Liu Xiao Dong and studied in HFG in Germnay. She is now in New York dispatched as talented artist by Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan Government. Etsu Egami currently lives and works between Tokyo and New York.   

Growing up in United States and Europe, and currently living and working in China, Etsu Egami experienced various communication barriers she encountered as a result. She felt that languages can “only be sensed, not explained”, thus becoming more interested in the discipline of language and communication. Etsu’s works comprise of various media forms, such as voice, video and drawings, through which she strives to question human’s instincts and the authenticity of communication. Curator of Pompidou art center Julie said about her , “I saw all these specificities as a source, not only of misunderstanding, but also of creation and richness in people’s relationships. ”. Chinese curator Feng Bo Yi also said “Etsu’s creation is about the concept and the significance of ‘communication’. Through the paintings and videos which embodies these mishearing games, as well as the evolution of times, the clashes between civilizations, we acquire a discourse on the barriers in language communications, and subsequently even trigger a crisis.”   

Etsu Egami had her solo show in museum, Entrance gallery Vol.1 EGAMI Etsu in Chiba City Museum of Art,Japan (2020) and many countries. She also had many group shows in Asia, including: VOCA2020, Ueno-Royal museum, Japan (2020), Negotiating Space: I Never Thought You Were Like That – Third CAFAM Biennale, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2016); Neither Here nor There, Yuan Dian Art Museum, Beijing, China (2016). Between 2012 to now, Etsu won numerous awards. Most recently she is nominated as Forbes 30 UNDER 30 in 2020 and finalist of Asian Art Prize of Sovereign Art Foundation in 2019.     

About Curator  

Akira Tatehata (b. 1947, Kyoto, Japan) is the president of Tama Art University and the director of the Yayoi Kusama Museum. He graduated from the Literature Department at Waseda University. He previously served as the director of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the president of the Kyoto City University of Arts. In 1990 and 1993, he was the director of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and he is currently a jury member for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.