MIYAKO YOSHINAGA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jonathan Yukio Clark entitled In the Space of the Near and Distant. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition in New York and his first presentation at this gallery. The exhibition will run from March 17 to April 30, 2022 and is presented during Asia Week New York (AWNY), a city-wide celebration of Asian Art (3/16-3/25). The gallery hours are from Wednesday to Saturday, 11am – 6 pm. During AWNY, we are open daily.
Jonathan Yukio Clark’s multi-disciplinary practice bridges his work in printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and textile with a focus on the intercorrelation of distant landscapes threaded together through a personal lens of family history and relationship to place.
The exhibition highlights a monumental wall piece “In the Realm of Mount Mihara,” the artist’s tribute to the rugged beauty of the volcano in the Island of Izu Oshima off the coast of Honshu, Japan. To epitomize the greater natural world, Clark uses his masterful monotype technique for six separate prints, each carrying on a panoramic vista of distinctive terrains and vegetations with vigorous rhythm and earthy colors. Opposite this work, a smaller landscape also from Izu Oshima embedded into a wooden frame entitled “Sakura in Volcanic Landscape” is flanked by two other landscapes; Mānoa Valley in O‘ahu and Hualālai on Hawai‘i Island. Both compositions are based on the slide taken by Clark’s grandfather. These disparate landscapes are recurring points of familiarity, cross-generational recollection, and natural transformation.
Other components of the exhibition are wooden sculptures and objects. They largely reference Japanese architectural motifs such as sliding doors and permeable partitions. Together with self-defined mementos of heritage, Clark uses his woodworking skill to build a hybrid interior and exterior to echo a fluid relationship between the domestic and natural worlds. These works, incorporating both Japanese and Hawai‘i -specific woods, visually frame or diverge the scenery behind them. In Clark’s words, “The concept of shakkei (借景) speaks to the integration of the greater natural environment into human-scale aesthetics, not just in the visual borrowing of expansive vistas […], but also in the spiritual incorporation of impermanence into the stability of built or inhabited spaces. In living this philosophy, we allow the transience of nature to become a seamless continuation of our own spatial compositions, and for the vast landscape to become intimately interiorized in our own being.”
Jonathan Yukio Clark was born in 1987 to a family with Japanese-American heritage and raised on the island of Maui. He received a BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in studio art from New York University, in addition to spending time as a research student in printmaking at Kyoto Seika University. After several years in New York, he now resides back in Hawai‘i and is Assistant Director at Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s Schaefer International Gallery. He has exhibited at venues in New York and Hawai‘i, and his work is included in the Art in Public Places Collection of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.
