MATERIAL
Wednesday the 2nd of November 2005

Koji Ryui with 'The First Draft'

Ryui sat in his mock studio with a white box placed over his head and proceeded to blindly draw portraits of strangers which he stamped with Firstdrafts logo, making his mark completely anonymous. In this intimate interaction, the gap between artist and audience is subverted, as one stranger touches another. Ryui also drew our attention to the subject and material being the same object, the audience, yet the artists true identity remains hidden behind the neutrality of the white cube.

Biography
In Ryui’s work, the detritus of contemporary culture is reclaimed and manipulated into surreal and lyrical manifestations. Ryui experiments with the transformative possibilities of commonplace materials; drinking straws evolve into amorphous three-dimensional structures, postcards form spiralling dioramas, tape and ribbon rise turret-like from the ground, and our sense of the everyday becomes elevated to mystic proportions. There are a number of skills which inform Ryui’s practice, namely his meditative sense of observation. His work adopts the unmomentous and accessible, making visible the systems we interact with and the aesthetic potential of overlooked mediums. The structures are simple, their construction explicit and therein lies their magic.

Born 1976, Japan.

Lives and works Sydney.

Image credit
Sarah Coffman and James Steele