Zhao Yao | Masanori Handa: Zhao Yao, Masanori Handa

Ota Fine Arts is delighted to present a duo exhibition featuring Zhao Yao and Masanori Handa.

Beijing-based artist Zhao Yao will showcase his work for the first time in Japan. In A Painting of Thought III-431 (2014), he visualizes the process of thinking by painting diagrams from business books onto a canvas. A tent in which Tibetan monks meditate in the mountains is imitated in Signals from Heaven – A Call to Men (2018). By playing TED Lectures which represent contemporary intelligence inside the tent, Zhao questions the concept of knowledge that is required in religion and the real world.

Masanori Handa, on the other hand, captures the places that appear as fissures between perception and reality. The four monitors placed around Zhao’s tent showcase Handa's first video work which was shown at the Hawai’i Triennial 2022. Composed of fixed-point videos of seascapes of Hawai’i and Japan, the work impresses with its abstract and poetic beauty through the use of artificial colours.

We invite all to explore the artworks of two artists from Japan and China who are re-examining what it means to know, to think, and to feel.