Mystic Lamb and Silicon Prophets at PAPER Gallery
Creative Tourist
For her solo exhibition at PAPER, Rui Matsunaga presents a new series of drypoint etchings. The series, Mystic Lamb and Silicon Prophets, references Van Eyke’s Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Van Eyke depicts the sacrifice of the lamb as a vision of the apocalypse representing all man’s earthly sufferings before the coming times of truth and beauty. Matsunaga appropriates this narrative to highlight our looming environmental crisis.
Matsunaga’s work combines a Western Christian discourse alongside Japanese Shintoism that believes in an interconnected world comprised of nature spirits weaving a divine fabric that deserves our respect. In the Western Anthropocene world, the human is at the centre of the world and has a divine right to exploit nature, whereas in Shintoism, everything expresses a spiritual essence so that man is not at the centre.
