Mie Kongo: Unknown game series
September 10 – October 14, 2017.

Reception for the Artist
Sunday, September 10, 4:00 – 7:00 P.M.

Unknown game series is an exhibition of works resulting from Mie Kongo’s on-going search for diversity in sculptural materials and processes. Kongo employs idiosyncratic systems of order and chance to create sculptural assemblages that give rise to coincidences and bumps between her working elements. In these determined, but unplanned moments, Kongo’s work emerges into a world that is recast into one of sincere playfulness.

Mie Kongo is a ceramicist with high mastery of her craft. She is a formal sculptor that investigates volume, proportion, surface, color, balance, and tension. Within these relationships, Kongo contemplates notions of natural balance, the unification of opposites, and the interdependence of all things. Kongo utilizes porcelain, wool felt, and found furniture, to construct “building blocks” that she assembles into geometrically abstract compositions that recall the early stages of an architectural model or primordial architectonic structures. These are the materials and aesthetic senses that Kongo uses to transform what is common and known to a quiet and playful unexpectedness.

Mie Kongo grew up in the outskirt of Tokyo, Japan and now lives and works in Evanston IL, where she makes multidisciplinary work: ceramic sculptures & installations, 2D work and porcelain designed objects. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions, “Unknown game series” at Dan Devening Projects + editions, Chicago, IL, “Beyond Function” Arts and Literature Laboratory, Madison, WI, “Reformat: Digital Fabrication in Clay” Lillstreet Art Gallery, Chicago, IL, “Circle in a Square” Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. She has been showing her porcelain products at Paul Kotula Projects, Ferndale MI and Room 406, Chicago IL, Lillstreet Art Gallery, Chicago, IL. Residency: Shigaraki Ceramics Center, Shiga, Japan, European Ceramic Work Center, ‘sHertogenbosch, Netherland, “Intonation 2013” Deidesheim, Germany. She received BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Currently she is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Ceramics department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.