Taishi Urakawa
浦川 大志
Taishi Urakawa (*1994, Fukuoka, lives and works in Fukuoka, Japan) works on the question of whether our everyday use of the internet and smartphones has changed the way we evaluate and perceive our environment. The central question is the role of images in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Urakawa sees the aura of the work of art, which was declared lost by Walter Benjamin as early as 1935, all the more in question today, since the iPhone has literally brought us art to our fingertips. In view of this, Urakawa advocates a re-evaluation of painting in the age of social networks. Interestingly enough, the artist uses a form of critical affirmation that, on closer inspection, may remind some of the consumer-critical art of New York in the 1960s. For his painting, he uses precisely those image sources that is to be critically assessed: Facebook, Google Image Search, iPhone Camera Rolls, etc. Urakawa creates contemporary landscape paintings using a painting technique that mimics virtual brush functions of the Adobe Illustrator design program. The image spaces depicted are clearly not to be confused with the natural, but only the virtual world.
