IBUKI MINAMI

Ibuki Minami, a painter born in Japan in 1995, graduated from an American art college and
has lived and worked mainly in the United States and Japan. Self-taught in algorithms
(specific methods of calculation and processing used to solve problems and achieve goals)
employed in linguistics and computer science, Minami constructs his works based on his
own modified algorithms. He writes the algorithm, which serves as a “blueprint for the
painting,” directly on the canvas, and then arranges colors and shapes based on the
program he has designed. The artist says that, by improvisationally putting different colors
and shapes, rather than mechanically following a pre-determined procedure, Minami who
creates paintings transcends its past self, the originator of the algorithm. The process of
collaboration, negotiation, or even collision between these two personalities is what takes
the unpredictable potential of Minami’s paintings to the extreme. The resulting works, while
they all share the commonality of being abstract paintings, are very diverse in appearance.
However, in the artist’s own words, there is only one goal in his artistic practice, and that is
to explore and extract the “core of art,” or the essence of what makes art art. Minami calls
his creative methodology to reach the “core of art” “minimalism.” The term “minimalism” in
art history reminds us of an artistic trend that gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s,
chiefly in the United States, and which was a general term for the three-dimensional works
of artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. The works of these artists
and Minami’s paintings are visually very different in appearance. However, the minimalists’
attitude toward their work, in which they sought to expose the “core of art” by reducing the
ornamentation of their works to the utmost limit, seems to have an inadvertent similarity to
that of Minami’s work.