Healing Fiction: Joëlle Dubois, Clara Spilliaert, Floris Van Look, Nami Yokoyama

In the lead-up to their second participation in Tokyo Gendai, Keteleer Gallery presents Healing Fiction with four emerging artists: Joëlle Dubois, Clara Spilliaert, Floris Van Look, and Nami Yokoyama. Although their styles and techniques vary, they share a profound ability to connect personal experiences with universal themes. The exhibition explores how images and language can both unite and divide. Each work is visually captivating and simultaneously contemplative. Together, these four artists offer an exploration of painting and drawing, providing meaningful insights into the contemporary human condition and the relationships between the self, society, and nature, all through their own unique visual languages.

 

Joëlle Dubois (1990, Ghent, BE) translates the personal into the universal and reflects on contemporary society through her vibrant paintings. Themes such as femininity, fertility, loss, and sexuality are explored, always with a blend of humor and melancholy. Her playful aesthetic lures the viewer in, only to reveal deeper personal and societal reflections.

Clara Spilliaert (1993, Tokyo, JP) moves between dream and reality, intertwining mythical stories, historical reflections, and nature in her drawings, ceramic sculptures, and installations. Her work explores the complex relationship between the body and the environment, where sexuality, history, and nature merge. Drawing from her Belgian-Japanese background, she creates a playful yet layered universe where her cultural influences meet.

Floris Van Look (1990, Wilrijk, BE) builds a surreal world in his paintings, where humor, fantasy, and history blend. His layered compositions combine figures and symbols from art history, literature, and mythology with elements of contemporary culture. This creates dreamlike scenes in which the boundaries between reality and imagination blur, emphasizing the power of the painting process itself.

Nami Yokoyama (1986, Gifu Prefecture, JP) creates paintings and drawings that reflect a contemplative sensitivity. Her NEON – Shape of Your Words series translates handwritten words into neon structures, with the shape and wiring exploring the layers of language and meaning. The work suggests that language, despite its unifying function, can also serve as a barrier to true communication. Yokoyama’s black-and-white drawings from the Memories of Love and Me series embody a subtle poetic power, inviting the viewer to pause and appreciate the beauty of the everyday and the unremarkable. In an often hurried, harsh world, her work offers a space, a moment, where imagination, stillness, and reflection are at the forefront.

 

Originating as a literary trend from Japan and South Korea, Healing Fiction focuses on stories that take you on an introspective journey. It serves as an ideal counterpoint to the sometimes-too-fast and harsh daily life. Travel far, dive deep: in this art, we wish to lose ourselves.