BIEN
21 March 2026 - 16 May 2026
PV: 21 March 2026 | 6-9 pm
96 Robert St., NW1 3QP, London, UK
For enquiries contact: contact.season4episode6@gmail.com
Famed ‘father of the Japanese short story’ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 work “In a Grove” lends its name to the title of BIEN’s debut London solo exhibition. Written during the Taisho Period, a time of political progress that saw new democratically elected parties temporarily take the place of the established oligarchic regime and both liberalism and global cultural influence briefly embraced, the tale lays out the contradictory testimonies gathered following the murder of a samurai. The discrepancies in the witness statements - from the samurai speaking through a medium, his widow and a notorious local bandit - not only leaves the reader ultimately in the dark as to the actual course of events, but also spotlights the sometimes subjective nature of truth itself.
That fiction can often be stronger than fact is a consideration BIEN recognises within the 21st-century context of information primarily shared and circulated online, as well as the subsequent proliferation of fake news, social media manipulation and indistinguishable AI offerings. A 1950 film adaptation of Akutagawa’s fable of falsehoods, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, further familiarised the unreliability of eyewitnesses and gave rise to the ‘Rashomon effect’, the synonymising of its central narrative conceit. Coupled with the contemporary exclamations to ‘live your truth’ popularised by self-help books, this concept of a desire for a particular version of events, albiet fictitious, overpowering one’s own reality is now widely accepted, espoused and encouraged.
Ideas of invented reality merge with BIEN’s long interest in light as an essential component for image making in the artist’s contemplation of magic lanterns. Developed in the 17th-century as a source of entertainment, these earliest examples of image projection saw pictures of ghosts, ghouls and skeletons transmitted through light-exposed transparent slides, often as part of phantasmagoria presentations. Such fabricated apparitions are mimicked in the artist’s large scale skeletal portraits of those three principal protagonists from “In a Grove”, at once a knowing nod to the truth that sits hidden beneath our exterior fleshy facades and a comment on how our experience of existence is now mostly mediated through screens. Our present perception of reality, not to mention the increasing expansion of virtual or augmented realities, is now powered by the very same light sources and glass slides that so spooked the spectators to those simulated seances centuries before.
And so, on acrylic stained linen appearing hazy as if to mimic the ephemeral flutter and fall of dappled light, figures take shape from simple. BIEN’s minimal approach to mark making foregrounds our inherent power to generate - and therefore destroy - images, as single lines that emerge untouched from their painterly backdrops, distinct from their naturalistic surrounds as evidence to the very act of human creation. In front, a further sculptural skeleton of cut-out greyboard slumps, the negative space left by the artist’s lines made manifest as if fallen forward from their canvas confines. Nearby, projection and animation are again referenced through a series of postcards collected from second-hand stores, their featured figures all but entirely extracted, with only the scenery saved and emphasised.
Finally, a single channel video work - the present-day descendent of those magic lantern luminaries - captures a candle serving as its own sculptural scale, burning from both ends and slowly swaying as it attempts to reach equilibrium. A material metaphor to the conflict between those opposite forces that so influence the artist - fact vs. fiction, light vs. darkness, presence vs. absence - in fact exposes their codependence. The flames eventually and inevitably meet in the middle as two sides of the same spectrum, evoking that Rashomon effect of unreliable accounts, recapturing the trickery of those early phantom projections and allowing BIEN to inspire a renewed awareness of our own visual perception.