Fuyuko Matsui  NARCISSUS

2007.12.15 - 2008.2.23

Gallery Naruyama is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by the aspiring young artist, Matsui Fuyuko. Since her debut in 2005 she has gained much attention, during which she has graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts as the first female to receive a doctoral degree in Japanese painting (the first male being Takashi Murakami).

As the theme of this exhibition, Matsui has chosen the Greek mythology Narcissus, the origin of the word Narcissism. This Greek myth symbolizes self-love, and can psychologically be considered a type of personality disorder, sometimes even close to insanity. As the product of careful self-examination, Matsui's new works have achieved a level on which traditional techniques are combined with modern academism to produce an entirely new form of Japanese painting.

The term narcissist often implies a negative meaning, one drowning in a sea of self-love and admiration. Yet on one hand, this “distorted” characteristic is a mechanism against auto phobia, and is a highly skillful ability as the result of speculation towards self-identity. Living in the age of community and communication, we have witnessed the representative psychosis shifting from a Culture-Bound Syndrome to a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The crisis facing one’s identity and existence in times of rejection, denial and oppression acts as a derivative towards the “narcissism” in all modern human beings.

Subjective judgments and personal views are all products of self-examination and love, thus enabling such ideas to be concluded and stuffed into one term; narcissism. Other factors, such as the judgment of deciding the priority between maintaining the unification or dissolving the conflict in oneself, the failure of narcissism as the result of pursing the impractical demand of “supremacy”, compensation of inferiority, distorted self-values as an obstruction to one’s character, self-worship without the slightest interest in the past or future, unawareness of one's lack in the understanding the basis of reality, “thinking” in general, can all be grouped together as narcissism.

By aggressively applying this discriminatory term “narcissism”, the context of contempt is reproduced in a strategy to convert it into an entirely new definition. This is an attempt to present the ever-changing situation of complex and versatile identity in the form of a painting.