Têmporas/テンプラ

Sokyo Lisbon is pleased to announce Têmporas/テンプラ, a playful and humorous group exhibition with works by Kanji Hasegawa, Toru Ishii, Kazuma Koike, Takahiro Komuro, Taketo Masui, Taku Obata, Ryuichi Ohira, piczo and Shuhei Yamada. The show will be the fourth of the artist collective KUROOBIANACONDA, and their first outside of Japan. In Shuhei Yamada’s words, KUROOBIANACONDA’s leader who curated the exhibition together with Toru Ishii: "in Têmporas/テンプラ we will create an environment out of unconnected themes and media to intrigue the palate of the viewer. The show intends to be like a serving of Japanese Tempura, with its variety of fried vegetables and seafood accompanied by a piquant sauce. Tempura, a representative, even indispensable, dish in Japanese cuisine, was brought to Japan by the Portuguese. It is a symbol of cultural exchange and fusion. All the artists in the collective, who come from different backgrounds and regions of Japan, grew up absorbing modern western culture from movies to music, fashion to food. We hope our new variations on Tempura will appeal to the visitors.” The idea of serving art to the visitor, just like food, has been present in all of the group’s past exhibitions, whose titles were: Kirimi, which means fillet or slice, Wagiri, the word used for round slice and Sanmaioroshi, filleting fish.This time the exhibition references a word of possible Portuguese origins— tempura. Têmporas is the name of the three-day periods at the beginning of each liturgical season once prescribed by the Catholic church, when people of faith should abstain from eating meat. It is thought that the 16th century Portuguese missionaries who visited Japan would cook a typical Portuguese dish “peixinhos da horta” (batter coated and deep-fried green beans) during these religious periods. Today, however, this period is no longer marked by the Church and most Portuguese people only know the word “têmporas” as referring to the body part temples.