ROH is delighted to announce our presentation at Art Basel Paris (previously Paris+ par Art Basel) with Stratum Vein — a solo presentation by Kei Imazu (b. 1980, Yamaguchi, Japan. Lives and works in Bandung, Indonesia). The presentation extends from the multidisciplinary artist’s major solo exhibition with the gallery, unearth (2023), highlighting her archaeological impulse to excavate the interstice between complex layers of history, mythology, geography, and evolution through and beyond human existence. 

The presentation—combining paintings, sculptures, and a large wall relief—takes its cue from Imazu’s research into the social world of botany, humanist thought, and spiritualism. The work of Friedrich Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, a Dutch botanist and geologist who lived on the island of Java in the mid-18th century, is referenced as a source for some of the earliest lithographic representations of some of what have become important natural sites in Indonesia, such as Kawah Putih, Lamongan Mountain, and Patengan Lake, amongst others. Contrary to the predominant colonial ideas of that time, Junghuhn proselytized a humanist, almost socialist, way of looking, criticizing Christian as well as Islamic notions of expanding external influence upon the Javanese people, instead suggesting a pantheistic formulation of metaphysics that integrates the existing animistic spiritualism embedded within the existing social fabric in his free-thinking manifesto Lichten Schaduwbeelden uit de Binnenlanded van Java (“Images of Light and Shadow from Java’s Interior”). Imazu’s works are further enriched by references to the ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who wrote prolifically on scientific and social issues in his The Malay Archipelago (1869) and also advocated for a new form of spiritualism that transcends material origins.

Having emigrated from Japan to Bandung, Indonesia, since 2018, Imazu has been deeply interested in the country’s history—including its complex relationship to its 300-year-long colonization by the Dutch—as well as the multiple stories and folklore that have been shared by generation to generation across the archipelago, which often contain parallel themes to global mythological narratives. Early humanistic thinkers such as Junghuhn and Wallace contribute to developing a framework by which Imazu herself delves into her practice further by non-hierarchically incorporating her complex surroundings, whether it be from calculated scientific origins or from more esoteric fable and allegories, into her works. 

Within these frameworks, Imazu may contain the images in their historical context, recast the images and reorient their bearings in relation to other constellations of myth and history, or else create a new surface where new meanings may attach anew. Imazu’s archaeological impulse provides a method by which the viewer may themselves reconsider their relationship to a vast array of material, gleaning as vast an array of peculiar lifeworlds by placing non-conventional knowledge on the same plane as scientific methods. It is in these ways that Imazu allows us to discern our path into these dense layers of material, that require not only their unearthing and unraveling but an agitation that incites tectonic shiftings—where images and things (human organs, budding tubers, fossils and bones, limbs, and cultivated land) open to new layers of kinship, to ways of breaching and breaking through and uncovering stories that lie dormant under apparent petrification.

Art Basel Paris opens to the public on 18 through 20 October 2024. Visit artbasel.com for further information on tickets and fair opening hours and reach out to [email protected] for inquiries.