Wooson Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Naofumi Maruyama Flowing. It is meaningful that this exhibition is the artist’s first solo show out of his homeland. The exhibition not only includes his recent paintings but also drawings of his early years, never shown before. Naofumi Maruyama (1964, Nigata) has been in the spotlight and praised for his abstract staining technique since his debut show, a group exhibition The View of Contemporary Art, at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1992.

His early work was compared with late expressionism painters’ like Morris Louis, and analyzed in an extension of Mouroutai, a Japanese trend, painting without lines. Recent critics for his work analyzed his style as part of Postmodernism in the sense of raising questions regarding absoluteness. By rendering a subject with a subtle change of coloring and indistinct shading without any demarcation, the painting of Naofumi Maruyama deliberately avoids precise depiction of an object.

The absence of line dilutes the representation of an object, and this reminds the spectators of ‘the person’ or ‘the moment’ in their memories so that the reality of its existence is emphasized. In other words, the way of his expression does not embody a thing but rather composes perception of existence of a thing cannot be embodied. The imprecise territory of his works guides spectators to the space of their memory. The work is only complete with their memories, and in this process it becomes a unique piece to each of them.