Imamura reworks various novels, historical facts, events and so on to make new stories, or makes entirely new stories himself, and creates paintings and three-dimensional works with these as their theme. Sometimes Imamura adds texts to his works, but far from making the world of the works easier to understand, somehow it becomes, on the contrary, more difficult. '... Text and image are suspended in a state in which it is hard to declare that either one precedes the other. Here too, can we recognize how, through the adjacency of two axes, a labyrinth arises within their mutual displacement?' Katsumoto Ishizaki (excerpt from the catalogue of the Tetsu Imamura exhibition, Mie Prefectural Art Museum, 2000) Through Imamura's texts and the images of his works, will viewers not sometimes suddenly realize that, before they knew it, they have come to feel a sense of incongruity toward the original story itself? The sensation of the original being suspended, and of being drawn into a labyrinth, will surely be the same in this exhibition. '... The statue of Balzac, after being thoroughly disparaged as "masturbating inside his cloak" or "like a sack of potatoes", was taken in by no one...' Tetsu Imamura To arrive, from this text and the images of the works, at the meaning of the exhibition title 'Inai', you will have to experience for yourself the labyrinth of the whole exhibition. Balzac, who said: 'We must acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing. But it is also a joy to have someone with whom one can talk about how fine solitude is.' By changing the point of view, its meaning becomes tangled like a maze. Balzac is famous for having the same characters appear in different novels, and seen from a different viewpoint, even a single person looks different. Balzac, who used such methods, may have had sensibilities close to Tetsu Imamura's; no, no, perhaps it is Imamura who is close to Balzac. Balzac's text is 'not here' in this exhibition, or rather 'not there', yet somehow we are made to feel that it is not the case that Balzac's text is 'not there'. But the painting of the statue of Balzac is there... and in the sequence of images that, before we know it, 'shift', the false and the real become intertwined and suspended, and a new story is born: such will surely be this exhibition. Imamura is an artist who does not set up a fictitious artist and hold an exhibition, but creates a worldview in which he himself, before anyone knows it, trades places with the artists, characters and others he makes appear in his own exhibition. Having read Imamura's text, have you not already, through Imamura's invitation, come to hold an image of Balzac different from the usual one, and a certain image of the exhibition 'Inai', and already taken one step into the labyrinth of the exhibition? Please come and see the exhibition of works by Tetsu Imamura, the first at MORI YU GALLERY in six years. Tetsu Imamura 1961 Born in Boston Graduated in oil painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, graduate school, Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music