AgainST Gallery is pleased to present a Sai photograph Ceramics exhibition, Not Sure Yet, from November 24th, 2023 (Fri.) to December 24th, 2023 (Sun.).
Sai is a photographer by trade who started creating ceramics in 2018 and has since continued to experiment with exhibiting those ceramic creations alongside her photographs. In this exhibition, Sai will present photographs of Iceland’s landscape where she once visited and new ceramic sake cups and lamps inspired by those images.
The photographs of Iceland and the ceramics based on them are infused with multiple aspects of the artist’s mental image and can be seen as an attempt to bring memories into three-dimensional form. We may learn and discover something about life when the commonalities between different things give rise to feelings and sensations that cannot yet be named. We hope that visitors will be able to share various “memories” by experiencing Sai’s works.

[Artist Statement]
In 2015, after sending off into the sky my two beloved cats for whom I provided end-of-life care for nearly three years, I headed to Iceland. It was an 11-day, 3,000-kilometer solo trip by car where I encountered the overwhelmingly large and uniquely shaped natural landscapes and horses you would find only in Iceland. I did not understand the language at all, and without a map or guide, I just drove and drove, sometimes visiting a friend who lived there. I of course did not photograph Iceland in its entirety, and what I saw was only a portion of it. I wanted to revisit and experience Iceland in a deeper way, but due to world affairs and other factors, that opportunity was lost. Then, in 2018, at a time when I wanted something more tactile to go with the flat world of photography, I came across ceramics, and recalling the intensity, grandeur, colors, and fragrances of Iceland, I began to look toward it again. In creating ceramics, my inspiration comes from something in my photographs, but what that something is I am not sure yet, and I have always valued this feeling in my past exhibits.
V Without being too settled on anything, I enjoy creating ceramics together with photographs and transforming them with each exhibition, feeling free to be inspired by my skills, the people I meet, the clay, and the glazes of that moment.

AgainST GALLERY was established in January 2022 as a space to exhibit the works created in Daisy Balloon’s studio AgainST. Daisy Balloon has continued to work with materials that become deflated and cease to exist in their original form. They have also continued to create against the tide of the times, thus the name AgainST.
At AgainST GALLERY , we will be working to create a new vision for the art scene by continuing to explore deeper into our ongoing philosophical themes and focusing on the three perspectives of economy, environment and society for a new style of communication and sustainability. We hope our use of new materials and collaborations with many different artists will make our pre-existing theme of essential harmony a reality.