Empty Gallery is pleased to present Yutaka Matsuzawa: Vanishing in the Wilderness. Co-curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tom, and realized with the generous assistance of the Matsuzawa family, this exhibition represents the first overview of this pivotal artist's practice in Sinophone East Asia. Widely considered the leading pioneer of Japanese conceptual art, Matsuzawa's practice synthesized a diverse array of Eastern and Western knowledge- including parapsychology, Pure Land Buddhism, quantum physics-- in the pursuit of artistic strategies for expressing the immaterial sphere. Split like an atom between the gallery's two levels -generative both separately and together-the 19th floor features canonical works from Matsuzawa's post-revelation period, while the 18th floor presents earlier paintings and collages spanning the mid 1950s through the early 1960s-- works which have rarely been shown outside of Japan.

This exhibition begins with a call for proposals from 1964. Calling for artists to exhibit their work with Matsuzawa in the highlands of central Japan, three aphoristic directions instructed would-be participants:

Don't Believe Matter

Don't Believe Mind

Don't Believe Senses

As instructions, they are formally conscious of the dominant Conceptual art being practiced globally at the time. However, as poetry, they conjure a speculative world that helps the individual temporarily return to a world of dissolution and disappearance.

Gallery address: 19/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen