ARTIST STATEMENT

My name is Tets Ohnari and I am contemporary artist mainly based in Prague, Czech Republic and Tokyo, Japan. I am a sculptor/ installation artist using various materials such as glass, stone and wood. In 2010 I was selected by the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Pola Art Foundation as a representative young artist. Since then I have been spending my time on art projects in both Prague and Tokyo.

As being a sculptor, my concept begins with the question of “what is the human act of creating something?” I have been examining the essence of interaction between a human being and a material whenever I set a target to create something “new”. When a person comes into physical contact with a material, action is motivated by his “consciousness”. However, I focus more on “unconscious action” in my work of art. Translating this concept into the act of sculpting, I see a symmetry between myself and the material I use. Rather than sculpting a piece of stone along my perfectly structured image, I seek to explore the material so that I could see the beauty of its natural form, construction and transformation. Essentially, my aesthetic has been created from the idea of “killing something with honesty and vividness”.　

Presenting the method of my sculpture, I focus on awareness of doubling and symmetry. For example, my perspective involves not only fundamental dualism - light and dark, front and back – but also the conceptual symmetry such as: space and negative space, space created by drawing lines, the object before and after it has been transformed. This is so that I can avoid an “expressionist” image while I give same amount of value to both obvious/ hidden sculptural components.

I adopt varieties of different techniques and materials in my works. This equals to creating varieties of different contrasts between what an object was like before and after being manipulated by my hands. I also strengthen my method of showing how a destruction, the act itself, creates an unexpected beauty of natural forms. On the other hand, I never discard any material but rather I collect detritus happened by destruction of materials such as broken glass, stone shards or any other kind of scrap to reuse them to make a “new” object. Through this progress I obtained the ability to manipulate, recreate or even reproduce a value to my art works. Searching for such techniques gives a great motivation and a chance for me to develop as an artist. This is why I highly put importance on the process of creation and not just the final result.

These days, not just artists but people break, destroy and control things as they want. Perceiving myself as an artist, I try to show the reality of man’s interaction with objects. Creating something is not just about creating something that fits into a narrow definition of beauty. Beauty actually exists in the interaction between the artist and the material.   

BIOGRAPHY