Open Frequency
Open Frequency is a curated online programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.
Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.
The paintings of Japanese artist Hideko Inoue investigate notions of people, place and time. These complex works, painted in oil, are based on old black and white photographs, predominantly family snapshots of both Japanese and European origin which she acquired from friends and close associates. The paintings merge the past with the present by relocating individuals now long dead to a colourful post-modern world.
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Many of the works are based on the photographic albums of her grandfather who died 20 years ago, drawing in particular on those from his early life documenting his travels in Japan and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Inoue left Japan for the UK in the 1990s and at this point began the process of exploring the differences between the two cultures and between the life of her grandfather and her own. This led her to producing a body of work which, in part, is an enquiry into what determines personal identity and to what extent the culture in which we live shapes our sense of self. |
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As part of this process, Inoue wanted to re-establish her relationship with her grandfather as an adult, so she ‘updated’ the photographs, painting him into early 21st-century Scotland. The paintings maintain the flaws of the original amateur photographs, often resulting in oddly-lit compositions, adding an extra dimension to the work by taking them beyond ‘reality’ and ‘realism’.
As Ken Pratt suggests, ‘There are aspects of the apparently straightforward, if clearly skilled, painting language that brings subtle surprises. Are the deeply "Scottish" landscapes that surround her grandfather and his friends in some paintings an accurate rendition based on the original source material or has Inoue’s own experience of living in Scotland played an influence? Sometimes the reality depicted in realism might have more to do with the reality of the artist than any objective reality held within an image’. The artist often presents handmade objects alongside the paintings, echoing the objects within them, in order ‘to prepare the paintings as "presents"'.
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A man’s scarf, tie and hat have featured, appearing at first to be authentic relics rather than fabricated objects, and further complicating the narrative of the painting. Curator Alistair Robinson writes, ‘Through their invented colour schemes and temporal transpositions, Inoue’s images seem unnervingly to inhabit dual timeframes, living in both past and present.' |
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'Rather than appearing as literal transcriptions of ‘actual’ events, Inoue’s works appear as both fictional creations and as artefacts from another age.
The artist’s transformations seem to condense incommensurable spaces – what one might call timescapes – into single, still moments. By creating a synthesis of her own experience and that of another individual some 50 years earlier and 5000 miles away, each image becomes a product of both memory and imaginative invention.’ |
Biography
Hideko Inoue (born Osaka, Japan) studied MA Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art (2004) and in 2005 was selected for New Contemporaries (Manchester, Bristol and London).
She lives and works in Glasgow. | |