Permanent Collection
Rafaël ROZENDAAL
On a pastel-colored plane rendered like the open pages of a book sit three short lines of verse. Rozendaal says he read Matsuo Basho’s famous haiku “An ancient pond/ a frog jumps in/ the sound of water” and was intensely drawn to the enduring power of Basho’s verse. The very simplicity of this string of words, part of the artist’s “Haiku” series based on the Japanese poetry form that uses a limited number of syllables to describe richly detailed scenes, allows it to evoke a different image in the mind of everyone who sees it.
Rafaël ROZENDAAL
Born in 1980, Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian artist currently living and working in New York City. Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His websites attract 50 million visits per year. He also creates installations, tapestries, lenticulars, haiku, lectures, and a podcast. His extensive list of international exhibitions and museum shows includes the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He gained considerable notoriety for Much Better Than This, a site-specific video installation shown on the electronic billboards of New York’s Times Square in February 2015.
Deeply involved with Japan, he was an AIT Residency Program participant in 2009, has held solo exhibitions at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art (2010, 2016, 2017) and an interactive art installation in collaboration with Calvin Klein (2012). He also contributed to Being in the Wired World (Kawasaki City Museum, 2013) and KENPOKU ART (2016). A 2013 exhibition sparked his ongoing interest in haiku.
RR Haiku 061 is on display at the Towada Art Center for a limited time as a “Museum” project by The Chain Museum Inc., which was founded in 2018 with the goal of leveraging physical and digital mediums to connect artists and share their artworks with the world. The Chain Museum’s main business is the operation of ArtSticker, an art communication platform for art fans to view art, share their impressions, and directly support the artists they love. The company also collaborates with artists across a variety of genres to create “Museum,” a project that transcends the conventional framework of a museum to bring artworks into everyday spaces like offices, commercial facilities, and even places within art museums.
