DIESEL, the Italian premium casual brand, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Akiyoshi MISHIMA (1978-) at “DIESEL DENIM GALLERY AOYAMA.

Akiyoshi MISHIMA is an up-and-coming young creator. He works greatly on his own solo-project, while working on various creative activities including commercial works, fine art works and VJ as a member of an artwork group, ENLIGHTENMENT. His creativity is having great control over colors and shapes and presents borderless images, and his works attract a high degree of attention from art persons to young generation.

As a reality of third-generation after the war, MISHIMA works with his own concept, “the aggressive harmonization in different cultures.” His creativity attempts to absorb different languages, histories and images from every cultural area, to restructure and replace it, and to capture the possibilities of the integration. His attitude might result from the anomalous existence in Japan that leads the vision of the world in the future with globalism.

In this solo exhibition “Elements”, MISHIMA attempts to consider the possibilities of harmonization in the world, inspired by the traditional Chinese philosophy Wu Xing (five phases), which describes everything with five elements; wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, with the cycles of generation and controlling idea that "water destroys fire, fire destroys metal, metal destroys wood, wood destroys earth, and earth destroys water." Focusing on the interactions and relationships between phenomena, MISHIMA creates an image for a vision of the future world by those five figural images and an experimental installation bringing the idea into shape.