Mikikoは、02年渡米し制作活動を開始。自身のブランド「Nantucket Firelight」を立ち上げ、15年には、現地ミュージアムで日本人の作り手として展示紹介されるなど今注目のデザイナーの一人です。2016年5月、初めての個展「Nantucket Basket x Nippon」を東京銀座で開催します。
今回、「Nantucket Basket x Nippon」をテーマに、アメリカのはるか遠い島で生まれたナンタケットバスケットが、海を越えて日本で出会う、私のバスケット作品展です。ナンタケット島で親しまれている花や動物たちをモチーフにした飾りがついた蓋付きバスケットのコレクションをはじめ、模様編みや茶染めの籐を使ったコンテンポラリーな作品や2015年ナンタケットバスケットミュージアムの展示に出品した「Five Twills」、日本の伝統工芸を飾りに用いた新しいカタチのバスケットなど、海の向こうに思いを馳せながら、私が丁寧に作ってきたナンタケットバスケットをご覧ください。
MUSEE exhibitions is a comprehensive design exhibition by Ginza Retro Gallery MUSEE. This series serves to introduce bold artists producing works with ambition and conviction rooted in experiences and environments both in Japan and abroad. MUSEE exhibitions focuses on installations that use spatial organization to turn personal experiences into art. Through experimental processes that reflect modern times while looking toward the future, MUSEE exhibitions strives to present a unique worldview. Please take care to note as well the contrast with the modern architecture that lingers from pre-war days.
“A program for the survival of Ginza: My take on things that are someone else’s problem,” 
Yusuke Shikano is an artist who makes artwork exploring the shadows that lurk in the environments and things that surround contemporary men and women. Born to parents who were both part of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, Yusuke Shikano changed schools many times during his childhood and grew up in environments where it was difficult to make friends. During those years, he developed an eye for perceiving the adult world. His creative work is based on his childhood experiences sitting silently drawing mazes by hand.
Going on to study at art school, Yusuke Shikano started to create installations that combined natural materials—wood, stone, and metal—with man-made objects.
The artist’s mother passed away when he was 20. Feeling that “if you’re going to die early, you might as well do what you really want to do,” he turned his ambitions to becoming an artist.“TADAYOI NAGARURU SENCYU no TOKI (2014), ”which he exhibited the following year, was an expression of the memories of time spent with his mother that he had felt in the rising incense smoke that he observed at her funeral.
In his graduation piece “ MIENU SONZAI (2015), ”which was created through painstaking labor and effort, Yusuke Shikano took a look at memories and people associated with the school building when the art department was reorganized. He created a clump of books that reflect the spirit mixed with soil, a physical entity that reflects the existence of people as shadows. The piece created a striking impression and was awarded the first prize.
We can catch a glimpse of the basic paradigm of a promising artist of the future in the way that Yusuke Shikano absorbs diverse values and the social environments of contemporary men and women.
This exhibition presents Shikano’s image of Ginza and unravels the history of the very part of town where the exhibition is being presented. The artist focuses attention on the city that repeatedly renews itself, having experienced two catastrophes in the past—the Great Kanto Earthquake with its subsequent conflagration and then the air raids of WWII— together with the people who find themselves surrounded by all this.
As can be sensed from the title, “A program for the survival of Ginza: My take on things that are someone else’s problem,” the artist’s take on his subject matter is not exactly cheery. He views Ginza, this place that has become agitated with floods of tourists and the upturn in the economy as we approach the 2020 Olympics, with a cynical eye. Are conflagrations repeated through history? We invite you to view Yusuke Shikano’s Ginza, a Ginza fraught with risk.
最初から最後まで手作業を貫き、精緻な編目と量産品にはない手仕事の美しい形、ずっと手元においておきたくなる、眺めているとうれしくなる、使っているうちに愛着がわく、ナンタケットバスケット。この魅力をより多くの方に伝えたく、心をこめて作り、お届けしたいと思う気持ちで、2008年に私のバスケットブランド「Nantucket Firelight」を立ち上げました。その思いは、今も私のバスケット制作のベースになっていることは変わりません。
Mikiko
