Wagokoro Art Exhibition, 20 Japanese Artists in Marseille

Wagokoro? In the Japanese language, this contraction of the words "wa" (calm) and "gokoro" (heart, mind) designates the Japanese soul. The word also evokes harmony, gentleness and peace. In short, everything that the Gallery Jo Yana has been committed to defending since 2019 with the public and French collectors.

The celebration of Japanese art in Marseille

From September 14 to 17, the gallery space celebrates the new Japanese graphic and artistic scene through the works of 20 artists.
Regulars will find there the confirmed creators of the gallery: Mifuu Oda and his textured portraits, painted with a knife, Moco Sawada and his cartoonish figures mixed with references to abstraction, or Shijinkou whose works remix the emblematic characters of animation. Japanese, all eras combined...

Emerging artists never before exhibiting in France

They are exhibited next to emerging artists, who had never before been exhibited in France. Most are painters, more rarely sculptors (Mie Takahashi). Some, like Yuroom, Agorea or Tomokazu Komiya, owe their fame to their practice in the field of illustration. Others (Naka Mitsuki, Ryosuke Misawa...) fully assume the heritage of Western painting and abstraction, even if it means enlivening them in the light of Japanese pop culture.

The new trends in art by Japanese artists 

Still others (Neko, Coin Parking delivery, etc.) assimilate the underground of street art and tattooing or Internet and television cultures without completely departing from the Japanese graphic heritage. Beyond the singularity of their approach and their style, all of them deeply renew contemporary aesthetics, and particularly the portrait genre. In doing so, they blast away our received ideas about Japanese creation and suggest that its pop and tangy inventiveness is never very far from melancholy and disenchantment...