Around the world in ‘100 Faces’
It seems like an age has passed since Hiroyasu Tsuri – better known as the artist TWOONE – first visited fluoro HQ this year to talk us through his upcoming exhibition 100 Faces. But now, three months later, Melbourne is just a day away from the official opening of an exhibition ready to set the creative scene alight.
One of the largest works TWOONE has ever presented, 100 Faces is a stirring exploration of who we are, as nomadic humans of the twenty-tens. A perpetual traveller himself, since graduating high school in Japan and immediately making the courageous leap into the great unknown of Melbourne life, TWOONE has traversed the globe – both for business and for pleasure.
100 Faces is the by-product of TWOONE’s most recent exploration; a three-year stint getting acquainted with the diverse cultural landscapes of Europe, Asia and the U.S. Whilst there, he felt bound by the urge to capture the multitude of faces around him – a moment in time – through candid photographs or quick sketches in his ever-present notebook; a medley of those he knew intimately, intertwined with unsuspecting strangers spotted in bars, on trains or even in books.
TWOONE describes the motivation behind this latest visual mediation as almost uncontrollable; yet he never anticipated that the project would escalate into such an extraordinarily extensive series as ‘100 Faces. For the exhibition, the initial snapshots have been developed into fully fleshed artworks that dexterously fuse watercolour, pencil, acrylics, collage, spray paint, mirrored glass and other less conventional mediums to convey the story behind every face.
Despite having crafted 100 individual portraits, all of which are narratively so unique, TWOONE avows that there is not one ‘standout’ piece.
“I think of 100 Faces as one piece, so it all means something to me,” he explains.
And whilst the small-scale canvas works might deviate in size from the strikingly large, public murals for which TWOONE is renowned, the scale of the exhibition remains monumental, as always:
“There’s always an endless list of things that need to be done with an exhibition, but I’ve done this a number of times before now, so I’ve just been enjoying being back in Melbourne,” he states.
Knowing better than most the ubiquity of migration in an increasingly cosmopolitan community, for the time being, the trip seems to have satiated the restless wanderlust that compelled TWOONE to leave Melbourne and set up a studio space in Berlin back in 2014.
It is where he will return to commence his next project, following the Collingwood exhibition and some time dedicated to getting back to nature here in Australia.
100 Faces opens on Friday 21 October and runs until Sunday 30 October 2016 at Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne. For more from TWOONE read our in-depth interview.
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