Traces of Disappearance

Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo presents Traces of Disappearance, featuring Anne and Patrick Poirier, Kasper Kovitz, Goang-Ming Yuan and Naoya Hatakeyama.

Traces of Disappearance is an exhibition conceived by curators Murielle Hladik and Eva Kraus, inviting visitors to reflect upon the current condition of a fragile world. Using a wide diversity of media, artistic approaches and discourse, the questions that the Artists and their works broach help us to capture what is about to vanish.

The site-specific artworks produced at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo raise, amongst others, the questions of ephemerality and the passage of time. Like human beings, artifacts are not eternal, but subject to the machinations of time. Starting from the contradiction between preservation and decay, the Artists embrace the idea of time by means of philosophical concepts and aesthetic qualities.

Emphasizing the 'evanescent', the Artists’ works stimulate our desire for silence and contemplation. Across a single united floor, they take us alternatively on a journey through recorded and unrecorded collective memories (Poirier, The Soul of the World), through a “sacred place” (Kovitz, The Sheer Size of It), through an ideal place (Hatakeyama, Mont Ventoux), or even through an artificial natural world recreated using digital media (Yuan, Disappearing Landscape – Reason to Be a Leaf).

For this unusual exploration of the passage of time, Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo expresses its gratitude to the curators, Murielle Hladik and Eva Kraus, to the Artists, to the Austrian and French Embassies and to Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan for their kind and renewed support throughout the whole exhibition preparation.