Press Release (for immediate use)
Exhibition Duration: 7 May 2016 - 11 June 2016
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday I 11am – 6pm
Opening Reception: 7 May 2016 I 3 – 6pm  (*Artist present)
*Artist Talk: 7 May 2016 I 4.30pm I Tetsu Takeda x Wong Wing Tong (HK artist)
*Special host by Ms. Daisy Chu;  *Exhibition music / sound composed by sound artist Nao Sakamoto
Venue: Art Experience Gallery


“The Sound of Nature” – Solo Exhibition by Tetsu Takeda

Art Experience Gallery delightfully presents a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Tetsu Takeda, entitled “The Sound of Nature” - featuring his most recent paintings and sculpture works. It is his first exhibition in Hong Kong.

Lived in New York for more than twenty years and returned to Japan in 2010, shortly followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in the next year, the accident has made Tetsu rethink about life and our role as human beings interfering with nature. There has been a mist of despair and sorrow for many people in the country, in searching for hope and an exit to tranquility, nature has shown Tetsu a new pathway for his art.

Almost as a meditating routine, Tetsu walks along the coast in his currently living small town on a daily basis, he observes and later on starts to collect different rubbish that washed up on the beach. He sees a pleasant beauty of these disposed objects in all kinds of shape and material, and such ingredients seem to have dissolved in his works. Looking at Tetsu’s paintings, there is some kind of organized form almost like a pile of stones or a group of living organic objects growing from the bottom, illustrates an abstract landscape of vitality. In some of his works, an image of a scraping black cloud may easily remind viewers of an atomic bomb photograph, it may resembles a tree or a head with an eye-like symbol randomly appear in the image. The artist releases these abstract forms unconsciously in his works, interpreting a portrait of man and nature connect to each other.

A unique graffiti brushstroke manifests great emotion of the artist influenced by New York in the 80s, where Tetsu was profoundly inspired by music (hip hop, rap, punk, jazz, etc.), graffiti, and street art at times. His free-flowing expression results a rather dramatic contrast with the poetic imagery. Nature inspired Tetsu to document life around him, his sculpture works made of collected rubbish from the beach shows a desire of restoring our relationship with nature. In his role as an artist, Tetsu relieves the despair around him and releases into peace and well-being in his art, sharing energy with souls who lost their hopes.

Regardless his nationality, Tetsu simply responds to the nature as a human being. If nature sends message to humans just like those rubbish washed up on the beach, it might be a wake-up call for mankind: to respect the nature and its materials. In Tetsu’s works, he invites us to rethink and reconsider our own acts and conducts towards our environment.