Joshua Liner Gallery

Biography

Tat Ito was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1978 and moved to California in 2001. Ito received a BFA in painting from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, and an MFA in painting from New York Academy of Art. He lives and works in Queens.

His use of “oil on water” as a metaphor for Japanese contemporary art and culture upon which the Western viewpoint is floating. This cultural experience is a symptom of the Japanese obedience to the Western cultural and artistic paragon. Like a skim of oil on water, its beautiful reflecting surface fascinates the viewers, however it never mixes with the substance underneath.

Ito conceptualizes his visual metaphor of a floating liquid ever-changing milieu of cultural ideas by making painting references to Japanese tradition and its conventions in a new hybridized form of the East meets the West. By using oil paint, the medium of the West, Ito further complicates this mix. Ito pushes the decorative aspect of art so that the semantics are less obvious. By doing so, he attempts to counter-emphasize the semantics of his paintings to make the context mysterious, and arousing audiences’ inquisitiveness. “In-between” disambiguaties an anxiety of being in a world of two unmixable substances.

Related News
Tat Ito on the cover of New American Paintings (March 11, 2010)
Summer Group Exhibition opening reception (August 19, 2009)