Whispers Behind the Wall presents four emerging artists who play with the tensions between concrete representation and immaterial concepts.　Working across different media, they approach narrative through primal or subliminal sensation: smell, sound, vibration, texture, color, taste, poetry. In doing so, they compress multi-dimensional perspectives and experiences into an immediate, visceral package – an ideogram or haiku.

Based in Tokyo, painter Kazuyuki Takezaki works with motifs of　everyday scenery and figures. Takezaki strives to capture the flashes of recognition that occur between instances of physical mutability and transience, hoping to preserve their immediacy. Using almost schematic approaches, he represents the way we perceive phenomena: the light, air, humidity, and sounds constituting his visions are condensed and formalized into the mixture of color and its contrast with blankness.

Through enigmatic, animist imagery of chairs engulfed in flames or personified animals, Tokyo underground subculture VJ and animation artist Chikara Matsumoto creates scores of drawings inspired by transcendent experiences, which he then links together randomly to compose films. Disrupting linear thought processes and conventions, Matsumoto’s films create the presentiment of a narrative always on the verge of beginning but never achieving any kind of resolution.

South Africa-born, London-based sound installation artist Dale Berning uses folk music, field recordings, and other sources to build up layered compositions wherein individual sounds are made foreign,　divorced from their original contexts and locations. Cut off from their former lives, these sounds derive their entire meaning from simply existing. Resonating through new times and spaces, they draw　viewers into a sensory investigative trail.

Using the company name Okame Pro, emerging artist Soju Tao expresses himself through the “production” of paintings, poems, music, and installations. Moving freely between diverse media while still pursuing the same single-minded vision, Okame Pro is a venture business determined upon its own reduction, with the goal of making human relationships possible. Guided by a childlike sense of tricksterism, Tao persistently returns to question the origins of things, giving his works unique texture and character.

Curated by Atsuko Ninagawa