11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Masaya Chiba’s witty, engrossing figurative paintings draw on an absurdist sensibility to blur the lines between sculpture, landscape, still life and portraiture. His works typically begin as an assemblage of both readymade and handmade objects created in his studio, which are then faithfully reproduced on canvas using a finely developed photorealist technique. Chiba complicates this transposition between sculpture and painting with visual jokes, inserting hidden anamorphic forms into an original assemblage or layering unrelated landscapes and even other artworks into his composition. He also toys with the sizes and shapes of his canvases or their modes of display, often contriving installations that resemble his original studio constructions. Chiba is best known for his ‘Peaceful village’ series 2006–ongoing, large-scale canvases depicting complex assemblages over well-known landscapes, from the Swiss Alps to the Grand Canyon. These works can contain as many as 40 handcrafted clay figurines, whose uncanny appearance has become a hallmark of his practice. Chiba is also known for the playfulness of his installations, which have tended in recent years to avoid the convention of hanging paintings directly on walls, relying instead on humorous apparatuses and counterintuitive techniques. His 2021 survey at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, for example, deployed a range of stands, scaffolds and architectures, including a giant terrarium that looped throughout the spaces, forming a ‘highway’ for his two pet tortoises to circumnavigate the gallery. Many of the paintings were hung at tortoise’s- eye view. Since 2023, Chiba has been prolifically developing his ‘vegetable paintings’ — still-life depictions of abstract structures created by the artist comprising crossed beams tipped with coloured balls. The small canvases are painted with a restricted, almost claustrophobic depth of field, and exhibited on shelves. NOTE 1 Gabriel Ritter, ‘A genealogy of nonsense’, in Roppongi Crossing 2013: Out of Doubt [exhibition catalogue], Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013, pp.246–53. BORN 1980, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN LIVES+WORKS INTOKYO, JAPAN These works are displayed alongside actual fruit and vegetables, objects more conventionally depicted in still-life painting, mounted on bespoke shelves and presented as organic readymade sculptures worthy of their own aesthetic appreciation. Extending this methodology are the ‘cloth paintings’ of Chiba’s ‘Theatre in the world of plaid’ series 2024 — a title of bewildering ambition — in which the cross-beam paintings and their accompanying fresh produce are arrayed across patterned sheets of fabric; some fixed to walls, others mounted on freestanding wooden frames. The compositions are completed with tiny video monitors, pencil-on-paper sketches, homemade photo wheels and arrays of QR codes linking to ‘secret’ short online videos. Both the photo wheels and videos feature Chiba’s household in casually jocular and touchingly familiar situations — from a photo- montage comparing the family dog to Rod Stewart to short clips of the artist’s partner attempting to remember the unusual shapes of paintings by American Ellsworth Kelly, or farewelling Chiba on the airport express. Curator Gabriel Ritter has placed Chiba’s work firmly within the nonsense tradition of Japanese avant-garde art, as both a reflection of the absurdity of dominant social norms and a rejection of the pseudo- rational, authoritative tone such narratives frequently adopt. 1 At the same time, Chiba’s practice exhibits an affecting fidelity to the language of painting, to the interpretative and sensory possibilities promised by its plasticity, suspended between convention and innovation. In his recent work, Chiba’s commitment to exploring a single painterly proposition through repetition and variation betrays a sense of play, of sight-gags and dad-jokes, being pursued with the utmost seriousness. REUBENKEEHAN MASAYACHIBA Painting with Vegetable 9 2024 / Oil on canvas, panel, wood, vegetable painting / 40 x 55cm / Courtesy: The artist and ShugoArts, Tokyo / Photograph: Shigeo Muto ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 74 — 75