The Container

Jack Mclean: It's a Long Story, in Full Colour, Without a Happy Ending The Container

Publisher Marketing: A bilingual, Japanese/English, exhibition catalogue (full color, 134 pages) for Scottish Tokyo-based artist Jack McLean. The publication features essays by the renown art critics / writers: Eleanor Heartney and Edward Madrid Gomez, as well as a commissioned piece of fiction, a short story, "The Unhappy Guest," authored by Charles Knudsen. The author drew inspiration from McLean's drawings and his persona character The Sad Clown. The story is printed only in English. The main focus of the exhibition is three conjoined drawings, a triptych of sort, that take the viewer on an actual journey, both visually and physically. McLean designed the drawings as a site-specific installation, following the shape of the actual container. As the title suggests, the drawings for this show are in full colour, which is atypically for McLean who traditionally draws in black ink and black watercolour. However, the palette is not complex, using basic primary and secondary colours as perhaps a child would: the grass is green and the sky is blue, like illustrations in a children's book. Alas, seeing McLean's characters in colour for the first time, adds a new dimension to his drawings, as does a simplicity that emphasizes the naivete of the drawings, and heightens the contrast between the childlike style and the unsettling imagery. The Container, as the name suggests, is no more than a constructed shipping container (485x180x177cm) in Nakameguro, Tokyo. The exhibition space, the brainchild of Tokyo-based curator Shai Ohayon, invites Japanese and international artists to make site-specific installations four times a year. Each installation remains on view to the public for two-and-a-half months. www.the-container.com