Onsen Confidential

Sat., Sun. and National holidays : 12:00 ‒ 18:00 Onsen Confidential is a hybrid city-wide gallery share and natural hot spring retreat/conference. The project is meant to bring together like-minded gallerists in a spirit of collaboration and cooperation and to provide a friendly introduction to the unique context of the contemporary art world of Tokyo. The money trees, oil on linen and canvas, were made in quick succession in 2021. They come from the imagination. There is no particular reference from a living tree. They exist as retribution, as private stories and as a sign for manifesting money. The recent painting Burnt image was a beginning and led into the ongoing series of drawing landscapes from direct observation at public parks in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Aoki's sculptures, with their simple forms, capture the small desires and circumstances that are not worth talking about, the gestures and habits that are unique to each individual, the shapes that seem to have accompanied them over long distances while moving, the situations in which they flow and disappear (which means they were certainly around there earlier), and invisible movements such as speed and gravity. The work is captured in volume, creating and visualizing space with a scale and extreme thinness that does not seem trivial motives. Most of his works are made of wood, but especially after working in Mexico City, he has been treating space, three-dimensionality, and even the fact that people come and go and engage in them as equally important materials, creating an neutral time.