4me4you returns to StolenSpace Gallery to welcome back Shigeki Matsuyama for his solo exhibition, Quiet Circulation.
The works gathered here drift from their points of origin, transformed, fragmented, and untethered, before resurfacing in altered forms. They echo a system of constant circulation: pervasive yet elusive, operating just beyond the edges of awareness.
Drawing from facial photographs discovered among the endless stream of online selfies, Matsuyama reconstructs portraits by projecting isolated eyes onto silhouetted figures whose race, gender, hairstyle, or physique diverge from the originals.
This subtle but deliberate dislocation destabilises recognition. Familiar features hover within unfamiliar bodies, suspending viewers between identification and doubt.
Through these uncanny pairings, Matsuyama evokes the anonymity and unstable truth-value of information online. His visual language prompts a quiet unease: Who, exactly, are we looking at? The eyes may feel recognisable, perhaps resembling someone known, or even oneself, yet certainty remains out of reach.
In this slippage, the works surface urgent questions about a technological landscape in which identity grows increasingly fluid, authorship blurs, and personal data becomes permanently embedded within electronic infrastructures.
In parallel, Matsuyama presents works developed through text-based exchanges with ChatGPT. Confronting the dynamics of misinformation, he extracts fragments from existing paintings, guided by language-driven dialogue with AI that shapes each piece from conceptual premise to visual resolution.
These gestures of cutting and re-contextualising echo early strategies of digital deception: bots engineered to simulate consensus, AI systems capable of severing information from its source, and networks that reward repetition over verification.
The resulting works do not simply critique these mechanisms, they enact them. Meaning is lifted, displaced, and recirculated. Authority accrues through iteration. Context dissolves.
Together, the exhibition becomes a space for reflection, a pause within the relentless flow. It invites viewers to reconsider their daily entanglement with images and information, and to attend to the quiet circulation that continuously shapes how we see, interpret, and understand the world.
