PITTSFIELD, MASS.- In its first major exhibition on contemporary Asian art, A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing is a campus-wide exhibition at Hancock Shaker Village. The exhibition features three artists—Yusuke Asai of Japan, Kimsooja of Korea, and Pinaree Sanpitak of Thailand – who explore links between 19th century Shaker art and contemporary Asian art. An immersive experience, A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing connects the forms conceived by these two groups, which share an intense concentration of minds, handcrafted intimacy, and unique use of space. Although worlds apart in origin and distance, these two communities are dedicated to a place of sharing. This is the third time in the last 30 years that Hancock Shaker Village has explored a connection between Asian aesthetics and the very American religious utopian Shaker movement.

A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing invites the three Asian artists—each with a distinctive artistic practice—to ‘collaborate’ with the natural and architectural setting of this 19th century historic village, its extensive collection of Shaker material culture, and the team who diligently care for and activate the historic property, including the blacksmith, the gardener, and chefs. Carefully considering the key qualities of Shaker living, philosophy, and spiritualism, all the works are site-specific or site-responsive, with at least one new commission from each artist. The show is guest-curated by Dr. Miwako Tezuka in collaboration with Dr. Linda Johnson, curator at Hancock Shaker Village.

With earth as his medium, Japanese artist Yusuke Asai creates wild unrestrained paintings and installations of his own mystical motifs using mineral pigments he makes from soils collected from local sources – in this case, a Shaker farm in the Berkshires. Born in Tokyo in 1981, the self-taught artist is working on site this spring to create a ‘mud painting’ that conjures up fantastical creatures and his own spirit world.

For A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing, the Village has commissioned Asai to create an all-encompassing mural painting in the 1878 Poultry House (the Shakers’ former chicken coop-turned-museum-gallery), made from pigments he prepared using soil from the Shakers’ forest. The soil has been collected with the help of the Village’s gardener, whose deep knowledge of the ground spanning 750 acres offers the artist a select type of soils to concoct his special pigments. Asai’s artistic practice echoes the Shakers’ lifestyle of making almost everything—from furniture to paints to hand-chiseled gravestones—with materials found on this land, which sprawls across Western Massachusetts in Pittsfield, Hancock, and Richmond. The naïve quality of Asai’s images will also reveal a strong affinity to the Shakers’ famed religious “gift” or “spirit” drawings; both are a testament to the endless power of human imagination. His mural painting – a stylized fantastical landscape painted with local muddy soil -- form a union of the material (soil) and the immaterial (imagination). To share this sense of union, Yusuke Asai will conduct “Soil Searching,” a workshop for visitors that offers the joy of image-making using the pigment of your own making.

Born in Daegu, Korea, in 1957, artist Kimsooja lives and works in-between Seoul, Paris, and New York. Many of her projects are connected through sewing or threading in which sewing becomes a metaphor for connecting disparate places and transcending conflicts. For Hancock Shaker Village, she created a participatory installation that engages the Laundry & Machine Shop, which dating from 1780 is the oldest building on the property. She will guide participants to transform the space with threads in the five symbolic colors of Korea, Obangsaek, connecting various points throughout the architecture, and will invite visitors to follow the lines as a simulated experience of the Shaker’s communal labor and living. Also in this building there is a display of 19th century Shaker domestic textiles, such as kitchen towels and bedsheets, curated by the artist and hung from a clothesline.




While responding to the function of the site as a laundry, a place where men and women worked separately but together, this work also relates to Kimsooja’s installation series Bottari, a Korean term for “bundles”. Tied bundles of ordinary cloth, like a bed linen, are used as the simplest of means to carry the most elementary household goods in Korea when moving to a new place, and as such, in Kimsooja’s installation, they come to symbolize movement and, in her own words, “a self-contained world.” The simplicity and efficiency of this world finds kin in the Shakers’ philosophy. Another highlight of her work in the exhibition—a video projection of her magnum opus Thread Routes (2010–) and its companion series Thread Routes—Lightwaves (2010–)—are in the Round Stone Barn. The second of this six-episode-series film, which focuses on European lacemaking, illuminates inside this iconic building, stitching together the light and the dark. As a whole, Kimsooja’s works in the exhibition follow the Shaker story of migration from Europe, settlement, and the building of their own lifestyle. “It is my pleasure to work on a site-specific project for Hancock Shaker Village,” noted Kimsooja, “as I have been very interested in their unique culture, aesthetics, and life style since long time.”

Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, whose work is in this year’s Venice Biennale, is often interpreted as feminist in approach, and her artistic vision finds its ideal in the utopian society of the Shakers, where women have held equal social standing for more than 2 centuries. Many of her works are also understood in extension to Buddhist spiritual traditions, informed by deep contemplation on the life-affirming power of the body. Particularly important to her creative inspiration is the female body, symbolized by the form of breasts interpreted artistically to resemble a stupa, a type of sacred dome or tower originally intended to preserve the Buddha’s relics within. Appreciation of life itself is found in Sanpitak’s artistic practice and the Shakers’ way of living. For this exhibition, she installed a series of Breast Stupa paper sculptures, all carefully hand-made and positioned to mingle with everyday Shaker utensils displayed in the kitchen of the Brick Dwelling, the Shakers’ communal residence. She also worked with a local blacksmith to create Breast Stupa Topiary, an outdoor immersive sculpture installation that merges with the bucolic landscape and serves to grow both Berkshire and Thai herbs and vegetables. Continuing the theme of nourishment, she will also create several special events, Breast Stupa Cookery, part of an ongoing project begun in 2005 (presented in nine countries to date). Working together with regional Berkshire chefs and the Village’s gardener, Sanpitak will take advantage of produce grown on the Village’s working farm—the oldest one in the Berkshires. With addition of some key Thai herbs, menus developed by the artist and the chefs in collaboration will unify the two cultures, served to the public using the artist’s stupa-shaped cooking molds -- to nourish both the body and the soul. Dining together is the most fundamental communal activity in all cultures, and through Sanpitak’s farm-to-table project, food becomes the art medium and the bridge between art and the everyday. “I am very honored to be part of such a historic and meaningful institution,” says Sanpitak about her work being exhibited in Hancock Shaker Village.

Yusuke Asai’s solo exhibitions include “Yusuke ASAI: Seeds of Imagination, Journey of Soil”, The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa, Japan (2015); He has participated in major group exhibitions at the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, Japan and Tokamachi City, Niigata, Japan (2015). He has also participated in art projects outside of Japan such as “yamatane”, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston (2014). His work is in the collection of the Takahasi Collection, Taguchi Art Collection, the Tsunagi Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Museum of Modern Art (Gunma, Japan), Ohara Museum (Okayama, Japan), among others.

Kimsooja is a South Korean multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris and Seoul. She represented Korea for the 24th São Paulo Biennale in 1998 and the 55th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion in 2013, and has been in more than 30 international biennials and triennials. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1; Reina Sofia; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, UK; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Padliglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Musée d’Art Moderne Saint-Étienne; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; PAC Milan; Daegu Art Museum; ICC Tokyo; CCA Kitakyushu; the Plateau Samsung Museum, Seoul; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and Centre Pompidou Metz, France.

Pinaree Sanpitak is one of Thailand's most internationally recognized artists. Her primary inspiration has been the female body, distilled to its most basic forms and imbued with an ethereal spirituality. The quiet, Zen-like abstraction of her work owes something to her training in Japan and sets it apart from the colorful intensity of much Thai art. Her rigorous focus on the female form, explored through a variety of media – painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, performance, and culinary arts, to name but a few – has resulted in a varied and innovative body of work. For the past twenty years, a central motif in her work has been the female breast, which she relates to imagery of the natural world and to the iconic forms of the Buddhist stupa (shrine) and offering bowl. Pinaree’s work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions in Asia and Europe, and she has participated in major biennials in Australia, Italy, Japan, and Korea. In 2013, she presented Hanging by a Thread at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a solo exhibition featuring her large-scale installation of the same title, which was subsequently acquired by LACMA. Another large-scale installation, Temporary Insanity, was exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia (2012) and subsequently at The Contemporary Austin in Austin Texas (2013). At the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012), she showed a large-scale installation, Anything Can Break, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Pinaree has exhibited widely with solo shows in Thailand, Singapore, Japan, France and the US, as well as participating in the 1999 3rd Asia-Pacific Triennial in Australia, and the 2nd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in 2002. Pinaree will have works in the main exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale.