Sean Landers
THE BEAUTY OF YOHAKU
June 20 - July 22, 2023
THE GALLERY is pleased to present “odo x Sean Landers,” an innovative exhibition. It features a large text-based painting entitled Drink My Kool-Aid (2006) by New York-based artist Sean Landers, a prominent American conceptual artist.
The exhibition’s central theme highlights the subtle profundity of yohaku, meaning “empty space”, an important concept in East Asian art and design. This aesthetic emphasizes the blank yohaku, literally translated to “extra white.” It is also called ma, or “space between”, “interval.” The concept of yohaku was originally transmitted from Chinese landscape ink drawings and paintings. In Japan, it has developed as an art form uniquely important to and found in calligraphy, garden design, flower arrangement, pottery, dance, film, and of course, cuisine. The concept has been heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and the doctrine of emptiness. The Japanese culinary arts of shojin and kaiseki show the dynamic culmination of this idea as performance art.
The key idea of yohaku allows viewers to sense the beauty and dynamic vitality created by empty areas in art. This view can be shared with Western and contemporary art and design as well. Empty space does not signify a lack or something negative. Rather, it displays an energetic area of infinite potentiality. This potentiality is what brings life to the use of empty space in the design, structure, expression, and definition of a composition. In Landers’ artwork displayed at this exhibition, the text and the empty space that surrounds it interact with and reinforce each other, strengthening the artwork in its totality.
We hope that our guests and visitors at the odo x Sean Landers exhibition will experience the subtle profundity created from the spatial orchestra produced by a variety of empty spaces, not only within Landers’ artwork, but also in the emptiness of THE GALLERY in relation to Landers’ spectacular works. In a sense, the beauty of yohaku creates artistic as well as spatial harmony.
This exhibition is realized in association with Yoshii Gallery New York and features special dishes created by Chef Odo for this occasion, establishing an exquisite atmosphere fashioned by emptiness. The aesthetic interplay between architectural space, visual art, culinary creations, and participant experience promotes a fully immersive and transformative exploration of yohaku.
Empty space in art is profoundly beautiful, revealing the infinite potential that dwells within its nature: full of promise, excitation, and mystery.
About the Artist
Sean Landers
Sean Landers (b. 1962, Palmer, MA) is unarguably one of the most important artists to emerge in the United States in the 1900s. As a painter and a multimedia artist living and working in New York City, Landers has influenced artists across a broad spectrum of the art world.
Landers is widely represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, China Art Objects in Los Angeles, Greengrassi in London, the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, and the Kunsthalle Zurich in Switzerland.
Landers’ work is also represented in many museums and public collections that include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Denver Art Museum; the Seattle Art Museum; the Tate Modern, London; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; and Fundación/La Colección Jumex, Mexico City.