Yozo’s work begins with discipline. Each line is deliberate and each edge controlled, producing images of clear precision. This control serves expansion. Within each drawing are signals of continuation: gestures that suggest unseen interaction and fragments of setting that extend beyond the frame. A single piece points toward a wider structure.
Anime and Japanese contemporary art provide the vocabulary, but Yozo does not repeat convention. He blurs lines, distorts form, and accelerates motion until the language begins to shift. Through these changes, the dominance of popular visual culture is acknowledged and reconfigured. His practice functions as reconstruction, formed from the material it questions.
The exhibition title What If sets the tone. It could be setting our attention toward speculation or toward retrospection. The paintings strengthen this stance by presenting fragments that imply a broader narrative, as if each image were drawn from a story still in progress. In many ways, as this is Yozo’s debut exhibition, they are.
This stance establishes the importance of Yozo’s debut. Technique, narrative instinct, and cultural critique are combined into one system. The exhibition introduces a framework, the first statement of an artist defining his own terms for visual language and its future.
It is a privilege to present Yozo Kelemni’s debut exhibition, What If.
In the 1960s, eroticism was a weapon to criticize authority.
However, that movement was basically told from the male perspective and was a “liberation” led by men.
Women’s bodies were treated as symbols, but their voices and sensations were rarely placed at the center.
Eventually, that eroticism was absorbed by authority, organized, and transformed into a system for consumption.
In the 2000s, we encountered the word “ero-kawa” (erotic and cute).
It was a term born from women themselves, and it was an expression to reinterpret their own bodies and desires, different from conventional male eroticism.
There was a possibility of a new eroticism that did not exist only to be consumed by the gaze of others, but that started from one’s own sensations.
However, that sprout was never fully organized, and was drowned out and forgotten in the speed of the next era.
This Yozo solo exhibition is an attempt to awaken that eroticism in the street.
The “ero-kawa” works he paints are not simply cute decorations,
but rather a password for reliving eroticism that is not absorbed by authority or the market.
And it is also an attempt, from the male side, to once again place at the center the female perspectives and sensations that past liberation movements had left behind.
In the 1960s, eroticism was a weapon to criticize authority.
However, that movement was basically told from the male perspective and was a “liberation” led by men.
Women’s bodies were treated as symbols, but their voices and sensations were rarely placed at the center.
Eventually, that eroticism was absorbed by authority, organized, and transformed into a system for consumption.
In the 2000s, we encountered the word “ero-kawa” (erotic and cute).
It was a term born from women themselves, and it was an expression to reinterpret their own bodies and desires, different from conventional male eroticism.
There was a possibility of a new eroticism that did not exist only to be consumed by the gaze of others, but that started from one’s own sensations.
However, that sprout was never fully organized, and was drowned out and forgotten in the speed of the next era.
This Yozo solo exhibition is an attempt to awaken that eroticism in the street.
The “ero-kawa” works he paints are not simply cute decorations,
but rather a password for reliving eroticism that is not absorbed by authority or the market.
And it is also an attempt, from the male side, to once again place at the center the female perspectives and sensations that past liberation movements had left behind.