Gallery Satori is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, UNREAL CITY curated by Mariko Tanaka.

UNREAL CITY focuses on artists’ portrayals of the urban metropolis with works by international artists active in North America, Europe, and Asia. With U.N. forecasts that half of the world’s population will live in “mega cities,” and that most will be city dwellers by 2050, artists in this exhibition have been challenged to interpret both the present and future of urban life. By exploring cities as dynamic products of human imagination – even arising through a sort of collective imagination, the process of a city remaking itself can be seen as a large scale parallel to the process of art making.

The exhibition considers the role of human imagination in transforming cities both from the top down, and the ground up. Examining the role of the urban developer as parallel, with that of the artist, the exhibit seeks to explore the tumultuous and transformative spirit of contemporary cities. Borrowing its title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the exhibition focuses on the basic unreality of contemporary cities, in the sense that they are under constant re-imagination, and often only loosely tethered to their cultural origins. This unreality inherently forces tensions between new and old. And, while never unattended by controversy, this tension is undeniably a creative force to be reckoned with.

Artists: On Megumi Akiyoshi, Stephanie Costello, Cosme Herrera, Zerek Kempf, Ha Rhin Kim, Miguel Palma, Aurora Robson, Carlos Roque, Katsuhiro Saiki, Philip Simmons, Jeremiah Teipen, Heeseop Yoon