This exhibition features Ishizuka's wooden sculptures and paintings.

On Takanori Ishizuka’s “Sacred Beast” exhibition
A long time ago, Japan used to be covered by forest. To our ancestors, forests were sacred, irreplaceable places of great importance. In literature and pop culture, forests have come to be associated with the fertile wooded uplands in Hayao Miyazaki’s animation film, imposing mountains in novels like Atsushi Mori’s Gassan, and the original source of the soul of Japan in the work of Kenji Nakagami and Shinobu Orikuchi. Forests contained a profoundly sacred character that surpassed any human wisdom, a place where the soup of life was made to boil and seethe.

Located in a dense, luxuriant forest north of Frankfurt where I used to live is a mountain called Mount Taunus. The German phrase Spazieren gehen, which means to go for a stroll, also implies the act of doing some philosophical thinking during the walk. In today’s Tokyo, however, taking a stroll means walking around the city. The art of getting lost in meditative thinking is also steadily being forgotten. The idea of a forest where the evil spirits of rivers and mountains still roam has been reduced to nostalgia. I got to know Takanori Ishizuka as a painter, but in fact he had long been concentrating on making wooden sculptures. When I went to visit him at his studio I was at a loss for words. It was filled with all sorts of strange animals standing shoulder to shoulder, stuck and rooted in place – all of which had come from the “forest”, no doubt. There was something fresh and boisterous about these endearing creatures; they were full of a vitality combined with a sly, ominous presence. Animals who live, eat, conceive, give birth and die by instinct alone have been granted a lease of life by Ishizuka’s own hands. These wooden carvings, redolent with the odor of earth, are making their first appearance in a long while – using NCA as a temporary “branch office” of the forest from which they came.
-Yumi Yamaguchi (art producer / art journalist)