Liste Art Fair Basel

Masaya Chiba utilizes painting, sculpture, and installation to create dreamlike works that respond to Surrealist traditions while also exploring the limits of representation and translation. Many of his paintings begin as assemblages in his studio. In preparing these installations Chiba collects seemingly random assortments of objects — photographs, wooden planks, potted plants, excess paint — to stage unusual material landscapes. Other objects used in his paintings are also drawn from memory, suggesting an illusory attempt to recapture objects and experiences that no longer exist in the present. Once configured into a desired form, Chiba utilizes these installations and objects as studies for his richly rendered oil paintings. Whimsical at first glance, his pictures also suggest an undercurrent of anxiety and instability, as if the perceptible world were melting away below us.

For Liste, Masaya Chiba constructs several table-top assemblage sculptures in his studio, of objects that read as both useful and decorative, both precious and ephemeral, amassed as if from a mysterious collecting hobby, an epic poem, science experiment or survival strategy. The cryptic combination of masks, tennis shoes, flowers, plywood, and modeling clay offer the impression of a life being lived, although perhaps in an alternate universe where materials carry different values and meanings. Chiba then creates a series of paintings in response to the sculptural arrangement; some are representational still-lifes while other works interpret the sculptural experiments. At Liste, Chiba restages the table-top, removing elements from the original formation and adding new components. The result: a deeply fictional, yet tangible space, in which disparate images and objects seem to interact with one another in a palpable exchange between two-dimensional and three-dimensional illusions. The viewer is then invited into this playful, unsettling mix of signs and signifiers.

In this exhibition Masaya Chiba exposes the truism that all artistic representations — from historical still-lifes to NFTs — are imbued with manipulations of meanings that change depending on where one happens to be standing and over time. His approach is part of a larger shift in discourse, away from an art history that situates all works in relation to past practices, in favor of a conversation that includes multiple contexts, histories and geographies. Art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu refers to this more expansive view as “a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface.”[1] Chiba’s work conveys the idea that what we see, and what we think we know, will soon dissolve and resolve into new and refreshed understandings.

1. Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Globalization, Art History, and the Specter of Difference.” Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present. (2013): 447-456. Print.

Masaya Chiba (b. 1980, Kanagawa, Japan) lives and works in Kanagawa. Selected exhibitions include Masaya Chiba Exhibition, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Painting and …, Gallery αM, Tokyo (2018); Perry Rhodan and my life, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2018); MAM Collection 006: Materials and Boundaries—Handiwirman Saputra + Chiba Masaya, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017); What to Do With Memories by Utilizing Things Such as Indirect Lighting in Light Box Style, Yatsuzaki Halo, Feeling of Wanting to Kiss, Family Story, Sagamihara Stone Burger, Forget Medusa, and Element 50m Ahead, ShugoArts (2017); Discordant Harmony, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2015) (Travelled to Seoul and Taipei); and Roppongi Crossing 2013: OUT OF DOUBT, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013).