DETROIT, MICHIGAN.-The Museum of New Art presents At the Edge of the World: New Work from Japan, on view through August 13, 2005. Tokyo-based Kenzu Nagawa, Maki Moro, and Taki Murakishi apply their own collective strategy to this new exhibit of their work. Known in Japan as Stray Dog, the three artists have created, not only a full body of their own visual art, but in video and in music as well. Kenzu Nagawa combines film and photography to create a dark but sensual world of swirls and chiaroscuro. His work is narrative without a story. Or, at the least, without resolution. There is a tension in his work that is relentless, never allowing the viewer the comfort of completing the imagery.
Maki Moro is an urban artist. She seeks out what reflects a city's decline and rebirth at the same time. Her work peels back its everyday life, humanized with a constant of construction and demolition.
Taki Murakishi creates portraits of his friends, the music scene and Tokyo, only to twist and layer and rework them into abstractions of his life. Oddly, perhaps his art remains the most autobiographical of the three.
Together, the three artists formed Stray Dog in 1996. A loose collective, they have accomplished projects as this group and with solo ventures as well, but always reforming to share their ideas and experiences and to reshape them into art.
