Daisuke Takeya went to New York to study art in 1989 and got thoroughly sick of being told by everybody and anybody that they loved him, in typically free and easy American style. On the other hand, he enjoyed the mispronunciation of his name Daisuke into Daisuki, meaning "I really like you" in Japanese and generally used more than the potent "ai shite-imasu" to express love.
This cultural gap, of being told he was loved at the drop of an American hat and hating it, and unwittingly being told in Japanese that he was loved every time someone used his name -- and liking it -- posed a conundrum for Takeya. It inspired him to create a multifaceted, mixed-media installation, using a juxtaposition of paintings and video to explore the complexities generated by the lexicon of "love." Minus the erotic, this show is about pure emotion, or rather, the words of pure emotion.
Takeya says he heard the expression "I love you" uttered to almost anyone, at any time, in the most banal of situations and thus rendered virtually meaningless. Americans might disagree, but at least to Takeya's Japanese ears "I love you" had been neutered. It is this inanity of the oft-repeated expression, said with a lack of real feeling, that he brilliantly parodies in the wonderfully painted oil diptychs in the first gallery.