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IMAGINING OTHERS: TRANSNATIONAL VISIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART

The AWT Talks Symposium invites leading thinkers from diverse backgrounds to discuss critical approaches to art and its place in contemporary society before a broad audience. What can art do? Why does it matter? And how does it translate across cultures and contexts?
This year’s symposium addresses the theme “Imagining Others: Transnational Visions of Contemporary Art,” with a keynote address by Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 60th Venice Biennale.

WORLDS IN BALANCE: ART IN JAPAN FROM THE POSTWAR TO THE PRESENT CURATED BY KENJIRO HOSAKA

BETWEEN CONTRAIL AND MOUNTAINS CURATED BY SOHRAB MOHEBBI

Screened at a special pavilion in the lobby of SMBC East Tower in the Marunouchi district, AWT Video presents a selection of single-channel moving image works by Japanese and international artists drawn from Art Week Tokyo’s participating galleries. Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, the director of SculptureCenter in New York, this year’s program, “Between Contrail and Mountains,” features 14 works by 13 artists.

ABSTRACTIONS/EXTRACTIONS

Based between New York and Tokyo since 2020, Enrico Isamu Oyama grounds his versatile practice in an abstract motif he conceptualized called the “Quick Turn Structure,” which consists of spontaneously elaborated patterns of interlocking black and white shapes. Oyama’s signature style is partly inspired by the aerosol writing found on the streets of New York in the 1970s and ’80s, and he has presented his works in a range of formats and settings, from canvases in galleries to walls and murals in urban spaces, including the six columns in front of Tower 49 in Midtown Manhattan.

B. INGRID OLSON

Born in 1987 in Denver and based in Chicago, B. Ingrid Olson engages with the reciprocities between photography, sculpture, performance, and architecture—with each gesture staged as a manifold approach to materiality, gender, plurality, and power. The artist has an intuitive, studio-based practice. Using apertures, thresholds, reflections, transparency, opacity, light, and shadow as layered devices, Olson’s work collapses the notions of image, support, and frame. While her photographic images frequently capture fragmentary glimpses of her own body, abruptly cropped and abstracted, her sculptural pieces might evoke the presence of a face, chest, waist, or knee without explicitly depicting these body parts. Whether captured with a camera, carved with a machine, cast, built, or found, Olson’s work evidences the movement, change, thought, and habitation that takes place within the parameters of her studio. The results are ultimately sited incisively within the history and infrastructure of a given exhibition space, testing the capacities of the artist’s and viewers’ bodies and the structuring of the space around them. This solo exhibition will showcase a new work by the artist.

ARLENE SHECHET

Born in New York City in 1951 and now based in upstate New York, Arlene Shechet is widely known for‬ her genre-defying ceramics and her hybrid sculptures that merge metal, clay, and wood into distinctive‬ forms that are simultaneously architectural, organic, and mechanical. Uniting seemingly disparate‬ shapes, colors, and materials, her works—while abstract—are imbued with psychological and emotional‬ resonances to invite reflection from the viewer.

Marking Shechet’s first-ever solo exhibition in Japan, this show will bring together new and recent works that ride the edge‬ between stillness and motion, much like that of the Japanese art and material culture that has long ‬inspired her. Enactments of tilting, contorting, bending, and melting recur throughout her‬ sculptures, which, unearthing the expressive potential of material and form, force us to sit with—and‬ move around—their contradictions.‬

HIROSHI SUGITO

Born in Nagoya in 1970, Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugito studied at the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts. Despite having trained in traditional nihonga Japanese painting, Sugito’s chosen subject matter is more contemporary and more dreamlike. His sparse compositions depict landscapes devoid of people with wide expanses of negative space, executed with a distinctively light touch and muted colors that imbue the paintings with an airy, luminous atmosphere. This exhibition of new works, alongside a selection of pieces from the mid-1990s revolving around the motifs of apples and lemons, will inaugurate Tomio Koyama Gallery’s new space in Kyobashi.

MIYU HOSOI

Gallery 38 is pleased to present Miyu Hosoi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Hosoi makes multimedia installations, stage productions, and soundscapes that treat sound as a repository of memories associated with places and people. In 2024 she participated in the stage production Tangent, directed by artist Shiro Takatani of the pioneering new media group Dumb Type, and she has previously presented work at institutions like the Nagano Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi Prefectural Art Theater, and NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), as well as in settings like Haneda Airport and Hibiya Park. Hosoi will present a number of sound installations and other works in this exhibition.

YUKI ONODERA

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Yuki Onodera has been based in Paris since 1993. She is known for her experimental approach to photography, which includes putting marbles in her camera to disperse the light and create eerie, floating white spheres. The narrative elements of her practice, meanwhile, are often inspired by historical incidents and legends. Measuring over two meters long, her mixed-media silver halide photographs, which she prints herself before applying oil paint onto them, bear the imprint of her own hands, overturning the notion of photography as a mechanical process. This is Onodera’s first solo exhibition at waitingroom.

NANKOKU HIDAI

Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is pleased to present an exhibition focused on the work of Japanese avant-garde calligrapher Nankoku Hidai during the 1950s and ’60s, tracing the impact he had not only on the world of calligraphy but also postwar Japanese art in general. Born in 1912 in Kamakura to parents who were both calligraphers, Hidai easily absorbed the principles of classical calligraphy as a young man before turning his back on its literary nature, advocating instead for what he called the “spirit line,” a more abstract and figurative idiom that some have called “unreadable.” Hidai also defied convention in his choice of materials: For his support he used canvas, board, and fiber board instead of paper, and he worked in oil and lacquer instead of ink, among other innovations. While Hidai’s work is in the collections of museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, his influence on the global art scene remains underappreciated. He lectured widely on calligraphy, held solo exhibitions in major cities in the United States starting in the 1960s, and collaborated with K.R.H. Sonderborg, Pierre Alechinsky, and Walasse Ting in New York in 1964.

EUSKE OIWA AND TAKEHIRO IIKAWA: THE BLUE SKY, THE COUNT OF TEN

This two-person exhibition will showcase a selection of new works by Euske Oiwa and Takehiro Iikawa. Oiwa, who received his PhD from Tokyo University of the Arts, has a keen interest in the philosophical genealogy of installation art. He creates meticulously constructed multimedia installations inspired by a wide range of themes, from the spatiotemporal experiences of isolation in a pandemic society to the playability created by games. Oiwa’s ambitious work Card Game (2022) focuses on our capacity for inference and conviction, while his first museum exhibition “P in Case” (2022) took as its subject our paranoia regarding contemporary life as an intelligent mechanism. Iikawa, on the other hand, is known for his Decorator Crab—Mr. Kobayashi, the Pink Cat (2007–) sculptures of giant, fluorescent pink cats. Inspired by the information overload of contemporary life, which frustrates attempts to obtain a full picture or complete account of any particular event, Iikawa’s pink cats are so big they can never be captured in a single photo. Behind the absurdity of this gigantic animal is a comment on the futility of accurate documentation in an age of the instant transmission of images and information over the internet and social media.

RYOKO AOKI: STORIES ABOUT BOUNDARIES

A key member of the experimental art scene that emerged in Kyoto in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ryoko Aoki is known for making enigmatic installations of drawings and objects. Executed on a wide array of supports, from art paper to scraps, the drawings depict everyday scenes, natural imagery, and colorful abstractions in styles ranging from cartoon to realistic study. The objects range from stones to carved figurines to items Aoki fashions out of old fabric. Like odd shrines or crime scenes, her installations invite viewers to speculate about the significance of their parts while withholding meaning as a whole.

For her latest exhibition at Take Ninagawa, Aoki will create a series of works in boxes, presented on tabletops, shelves, the floor, and elsewhere, that deploy shifts in scale and perspective to draw viewers into the spaces they contain. For Aoki, the works converse with precedents ranging from Genpei Akasegawa’s Canned Universe (1964), for which the Anti-Art trickster conceptually canned the universe by reversing the position of the labels of canned goods from outside to inside the cans, to On Kawara’s Date Paintings and Susan Hiller’s vitrine installations.

AKI TSUKAMOTO

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1989, Aki Tsukamoto studied painting and printmaking at Musashino Art University in Tokyo while working for Takashi Murakami at Kaikai Kiki Gallery. He later moved to New York to work as an assistant to Tomokazu Matsuyama, before returning to Tokyo, where he is currently based. Tsukamoto’s experiences with silkscreen techniques and assisting these artists with their painting gave him a natural affinity for Pop art, leading him to develop a style he calls “New Cubism,” which he uses to depict popular anime and cartoon characters in vivid colors. Throughout his practice, Tsukamoto samples eclectic motifs from disparate contexts while maintaining a rigorous commitment to oil painting techniques and displaying a sharp consciousness of art history. This solo exhibition will feature a selection of oil paintings, including new works.

DAVID STENBECK

Born in Sweden in 1978, David Stenbeck is known for using the software Cinema 4D to produce surreal landscapes of the open sky or bodies of water that often incorporate reflections of otherworldly light sources. A colorful group of balloons hovers on the surface of water in one work, a neon beam pierces a luscious white cloud with its preternatural radiance in another, while a third depicts a pink-tinged smoke bomb that seems to have been detonated on a snowy mountainside. A typically crisp and deftly framed Stenbeck image offers the promise of a cosmic miracle amid the mundanity of everyday life—an elusive quality that has attracted brands like Apple and Valentino to collaborate with him. This solo exhibition will showcase digital prints and a video installation.

JAEEUN CHOI

Born in 1953 in Seoul, Jaeeun Choi moved to Japan in 1976 to study at the Sogetsu school of avant-garde ikebana flower arrangement under Hiroshi Teshigahara. She soon went on to forge her own approach to the discipline using soil along with plants, reflecting a holistic consciousness of the wider contexts of nature and time that continues to inform her practice today. This is apparent in Choi’s employment of delicate materials, such as century-old aged paper and pressed flowers, to explore themes of time, nature, and existence. Her sweeping, cosmic vision can also be seen in sprawling installations, such as the thousands of pieces of dead coral from Okinawa that she presented in a recent solo exhibition at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum. This exhibition will feature new photographs and sculptural installations by Choi.

VAJIKO CHACHKHIANI

Based between Berlin and Tbilisi, Georgian artist Vajiko Chachkhiani works across film, sculpture, and installation. Having initially studied mathematics and informatics, Chachkhiani went on to study fine arts in Berlin and Amsterdam. His practice is focused on an exploration of how the human psyche operates, or in his words, “the way history defines psychic tendencies, and the intersection of inner and outer narratives.” The results are often uncanny and otherworldly. At the Venice Biennale in 2017, he presented a Georgian log cabin filled with furniture that grew moss as rain got inside the work, suggesting an inversion between interior and exterior environments and states of being. This solo exhibition will feature new videos and sculptural installations.

MICHIKO KON

Japanese photographer Michiko Kon initially studied painting and printmaking before attending Tokyo Photographic College from 1978–80. Delving deep into her subconscious in search of inspiration for her otherworldly still life images, Kon transforms seemingly mundane objects like vegetables, actual sea creatures like fish and squid, flowers, and insects into surreal, enigmatic scenes that she then photographs and prints herself. Her recent work in Mexico draws on local motifs to juxtapose her own views on life and death with the country’s unique blend of religion and occultism. Taxidermy, insects, silkworms, larvae, and cocoons are just some of the organic materials that Kon uses to express her ideas of transmigration and the circle of life. Elsewhere, imaginary beasts draped in eyeballs and flowers or robed in garments made of fish and cocoons take on an inexplicable sensuality, becoming so vivid that the lush, handmade prints barely seem to contain them. This solo exhibition will feature around 20 gelatin silver prints by the artist.

DANIELLE ORCHARD

Born in 1985, American painter Danielle Orchard is known for her eclectic portraits that reference Cubist and modern masters like Picasso and Matisse, with a particular interest in representations of the female body. Using the multiple perspectives of analytical Cubism and a thick, saturated impasto technique, Orchard maintains a practice that introduces the perspective of a contemporary female artist into a genre historically dominated by male practitioners—a practice also informed by her own experiences posing for and teaching life drawing classes. This solo exhibition, her first in Japan, will showcase a selection of new paintings.

CHEN WEI

Born in 1980, Chen Wei is known for making staged photographs that reflect the vertiginous pace of change in urban China, especially in Beijing, the country’s political capital. He frequently depicts elaborate fictional settings, such as a nightclub or abandoned convenience store, by building sets in his studio that he then photographs with a neutral, impassive gaze. Chen also deploys an eclectic range of materials, including taxidermy, broken mirrors, and melted wax, to develop intricate narratives that are by turns ominous and idealistic. This solo exhibition will showcase both archival inkjet prints and sculptures made of LED boards and steel.

KOUR POUR AND REMBER YAHUARCANI

This two-person exhibition brings together works by Kour Pour and Rember Yahuarcani. Born in Exeter, England, and now based in Los Angeles, Pour achieved recognition as one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” in both 2015 and 2017 on account of his distinctive “carpet paintings” that combine Persian motifs with elements taken from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and Western abstract painting. Yahuarcani, a member of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia in Peru, is known for paintings that combine iconography from Uitoto mythology with Western art traditions and techniques. He uses vivid colors and delicate linework to depict the daily life of the Uitoto people and the connections between plants, animals, humans, and spirits in the Amazon. Yahuarcani’s works are also on view in this year’s 60th Venice Biennale.

ROBY DWI ANTONO

Born in Indonesia in 1990, the self-taught Yogyakarta-based artist Roby Dwi Antono grew up in a household that encouraged his artistic ambitions by allowing him to draw freely on the walls at home. Inspired by his artistic idols, such as Mark Ryden and Yoshitomo Nara, Antono’s singular visual language forges connections between classical Renaissance artworks, Futurism, and Surrealism, as well as science fiction and natural history. His brand of contemporary Surrealism is filled with chimerical figures made up of human, animal, and alien elements mixed with mythological creatures and pop cultural icons. On display in this solo exhibition will be paintings on canvas and wood, single-channel video installations, and drawings in oil stick, oil pastel, and pencil.

YUKI HARADA

Partially inspired by his experiences in Hawaii, where he has spent time off and on since 2019, Japanese artist Yuki Harada explores themes related to transnational culture, such as pidgin English and the history of immigration, in his practice. His latest work, Home Port (2023), takes Lahaina, the former 19th-century capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom on the island of Maui, as its starting point. Informed by exhaustive field research into the local history, people, and culture, the work alludes to the distant past of this settlement while also hinting at the tragedy of more recent events such as the great wildfire that devastated the region and its community in August 2023. Harada’s video uses computer-generated visuals to depict landscapes of a hypothetical Lahaina from a distant future that contains hints of its past—as a port for whaling vessels that historically attracted working immigrants from Japan and elsewhere, as a flourishing tourist destination after World War II, and as a center for marine art.

ALTARS OF PROMETHEUS

Born in 1976 in Gunma Prefecture, Meiro Koizumi employs diverse practices, including video, performance, and drawing, to address the power dynamics of the family and the nation, the boundaries between private and public, and the unwritten social codes dictating collective obligations in Japanese society and culture. Through the creation of elaborately choreographed scenarios, Koizumi shows how these invisible social forces determine everything from the trajectory of individual behavior to the course of national history. His works pack an emotional charge that can range from sharp irony and dark comedy to earnest psychological intensity. This solo exhibition will feature a selection of new sculptures and installations.

SATORU AOYAMA

Satoru Aoyama, who studied textiles at Goldsmiths College in London and fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is known for his meticulously detailed embroidery works. Produced with industrial sewing machines, these works expand the boundaries of the medium of embroidery while also raising questions about human labor, technology, and modernization. Aoyama’s recent solo exhibition at the Meguro Museum of Art, “A Boy Who Sews Forever,” showcased works inspired by things that have disappeared or become obsolete with the passage of time, including the school he used to attend in Tokyo’s Meguro district and Labor Day demonstrations in New York City. Building on these themes, this solo exhibition will feature a series of works focusing on things and people that are disappearing from today’s capitalist society.

MAUREEN GALLACE

Born in 1960, American artist Maureen Gallace is known for her intimate paintings of rural and coastal New England. Her landscapes are typically devoid of people, featuring vague contours and soft, muted colors that evoke a faint nostalgia. Although Gallace studied under David Salle at Rutgers University while working toward her MFA, the flattened perspective and omission of detail in her work has little in common with the postmodern expressionism that Salle represents, displaying instead a strong affinity with the early American modernism of Edward Hopper or Milton Avery. This exhibition will feature a selection of small paintings.

ON MONO, KOTO, AND IMAGE

This exhibition takes its starting point from mono and koto, two concepts that are said to shape thought and creation in Japanese art. Often translated as “material,” “object,” or “thing,” mono refers to an object that occupies space or a form that is perceptible by the human senses. Carrying the sense of “incident” or “event,” koto, on the other hand, refers to an abstract object of thought, consciousness, phenomena, action, or character.

One of the artists featured in this group exhibition, Shigeru Onishi (1928–1994) studied topology and theoretical mathematics before turning to photography as a way of expressing his mathematical theories through art. He later shifted to working in avant-garde calligraphy and abstract ink painting, making work that the influential curator and critic Michel Tapié showed in Europe alongside pieces by Gutai artists in the late 1950s and 1960s. Recent years have seen a reevaluation of Onishi’s photographic output and his use of experimental techniques including multiple exposure, discoloration, and color tone manipulation using temperature. Alongside Onishi’s works, the paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and videos by the other participating artists tease out the implications of mono and koto in modern and contemporary Japanese artistic practices

KAZUO SHIRAGA & AKIRA KANAYAMA: PLUS-MINUS

“I said to him, ‘You [Kanayama] seem to like cold abstraction, so why don’t you explore the extremities of that? I like hot abstraction, so I’ll explore the opposite extreme.’ We promised to do that and said, ‘You are here, I am here.’ And that is how I conceived the theory of Plus-Minus.” —Kazuo Shiraga

Fergus McCaffrey is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of Gutai artists Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008) and Akira Kanayama (1924–2006). “Plus-Minus” focuses on both artists’ highly individualistic and innovative methods of painting that fulfilled the Gutai mantra of “making art that has never been seen before.” Shiraga relied on raw physicality and expressive bodily gestures, as seen in his foot paintings, while Kanayama embraced techniques and materials associated with mass production and consumption—such as acrylic paint, motors, and robots—as well as repetitive geometric patterns. This exhibition celebrates the centennial of the birth of both of these Gutai artists.

SHUSUKE TANAKA

Osaka-based artist Shusuke Tanaka’s painting practice is grounded in a desire to depict the wonder in everyday life. For his 2022 exhibition “Painting through the Museum” at the Osaka Museum of Natural History, Tanaka produced, for example, a series of large paintings that sought to represent the experience of viewing objects like fossils and other specimens in the museum’s collection. Tanaka’s latest works approach the physicality of painting and its limited frame as a means of embodying the spontaneity of objects and scenes that appear in a particular configuration only once in a lifetime.

YUKARI MOTOYAMA, FUTOSHI MIYAGI: BIRDS

This two-person exhibition includes new work by Yukari Motoyama, an oil painter by training whose works deconstruct the various elements that make up painting, and Futoshi Miyagi, known for a practice that confronts his own identity as a sexual minority. It is inspired by the otherness of birds as hidden presences and sudden visitors in our urban lives, and their uniqueness as motifs with biological mysteries and histories behind them. Specifically, these works by Motoyama and Miyagi are based on representations of birds in modern and contemporary Japanese literature and music.

YUTAKA NOZAWA

Working across installation, photography, and video, Yutaka Nozawa depicts humorous, staged situations where overlapping images and objects coexist and point to each other in a kind of self-referential loop. A series of printed photos mounted in acrylic frames, for example, depicts fragments of those same frames within the images, like visual riddles that challenge the viewer to decipher them. Nozawa’s multimedia installations, on the other hand, often contain complex arrangements of objects alongside printed photos that depict those objects within a three-dimensional installation space, producing a mishmash of referents and perspectives that provocatively frustrate any attempt at a cohesive interpretation. This exhibition will feature a selection of photographs, paintings, and videos by the artist.

RYOICHI FUJISAKI

Born in 1975 in Osaka, Ryoichi Fujisaki studied sculpture at Kyoto City University of Arts and is known for a practice that confronts the realities of materials. Started in 2020, his ongoing “scan” series, for example, explores the sculptural concepts of positive and negative space on a flat surface by transferring uneven textures from the reverse side of a wood panel onto a cutting mat. On display in this solo exhibition will be two-dimensional works made of PVC sheets and pigment on wood panel alongside a single-channel video and a new sculptural installation.

DAN MCCARTHY

Born in Hawaii and raised in Southern California, Dan McCarthy studied both painting and ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York in 1989. After several decades focusing on his painting practice, in 2010 he reconnected with ceramics. McCarthy takes an eclectic approach to the medium that is both contemporary and respectful of historical traditions. This is evident in everything from his use of kintsugi, a Japanese ceramic technique dating back to the 15th century that employs gold leaf to make repairs to pots, to the iconically playful forms and vividly colored glazes of his “Face Pots,” which are often adorned with gold and silver luster. His genre-defying style pushes ceramic art into the realm of contemporary sculpture, much like Takuro Kuwata, another ceramic artist represented by the gallery with whom he exhibited in the two-person show “Dear Friend” in 2022. McCarthy’s first solo exhibition in Japan will feature new ceramic works featuring bird motifs accompanied by new paintings.

JUSTIN CAGUIAT AND RAFAEL DELACRUZ

This exhibition showcases two emerging artists: Justin Caguiat and Rafael Delacruz. Caguiat is known for his large-scale paintings typically done on pinned, unstretched canvases. Combining swirls of luxuriant color and dense layering with abstract and pointillist forms and faint figurative touches, Caguiat’s work has prompted comparisons to the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Self-taught artist Rafael Delacruz deploys a wide range of techniques, from charcoal drawing to oil and acrylic painting to making silkscreens of digitally distorted images. Often beginning with a simple motif from everyday life, such as a car or shopping cart, Delacruz then layers vibrant colors over these subjects, imparting an almost spiritual quality to quotidian objects through dreamy abstraction.

DREAMING CHIMERA

Hagiwara Projects is pleased to present “Dreaming Chimera,” a group exhibition cocurated by Kazuhito Tanaka, an artist and the founder and director of Kyoto-based artist-run space soda, and multinational artist duo Ittah Yoda. Both Tanaka, who explores abstract expression through photography, and Ittah Yoda, whose multisensory installations foster communication between human and nonhuman beings, are presenting works in the exhibition. Among the six other participants are Tbilisi-based mixed-media artist Nika Kutateladze, who creates poetic paintings and sculptures that deal with social and environmental transformation, and Tokyo-based artist Maiko Jinushi, who is known for her contemplative video works that explore themes of time, memory, and narrative.

SHIZUKA OKADA

Born in 1987 in Gunma Prefecture and currently based in Kyoto, Shizuka Okada studied ceramics in the department of craft and industrial design at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. She is known for her glazed ceramic objects that combine animal, plant, and other motifs drawn from everyday life with abstract elements. This solo exhibition will present a selection of new ceramic sculptures by the artist.

KAZUYO KINOSHITA, YOKO SAWAI, AND TOEKO TATSUNO

Kazuyo Kinoshita, Yoko Sawai, and Toeko Tatsuno developed their unique artistic practices in the Japanese postwar period while simultaneously responding to global trends in the Conceptual art and abstract painting movements of the time. After being involved in the avant-garde Group I, Kinoshita went on to use photography and painting to examine the relations between image, perception, and material. Sawai is known for works in which she draws countless parallel lines on paper with a knife and highlights these scratches with carbon chalk. Tatsuno, for her part, explored the nature of multilayered pictorial space through geometric abstraction. These three artists have been the subject of reappraisal in recent years. All three were showcased in the exhibition “Women and Abstraction” at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2023, while the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, hosted a retrospective of Kinoshita’s work earlier this year on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of her passing.

YOSHITOMO NARA

Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Yoshitomo Nara at the gallery’s Tokyo location in November 2024. The new body of work created this year and sees Nara using a limited color palette and simple, distinct lines to carry and convey his potent, thought-provoking messages. On monochrome backgrounds, Nara’s imagination runs free, and his rapid strokes are full of spontaneity and energy. His characteristically wide-eyed, large-headed figures, delineated in paint with the same economy of line as in his pencil drawings, are accompanied by bold inscriptions: declarations that originate directly and sincerely from Nara’s heart. This solo exhibition will be followed by a larger show at Blum’s Los Angeles location in January 2025.

TABAIMO

Born in 1975 in Hyogo Prefecture, Tabaimo achieved worldwide acclaim after representing Japan at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. She is known for her large-scale video installations that employ meticulously hand-drawn images inspired by manga, anime, and ukiyo-e woodblock prints to depict surreal narratives that unfold within seemingly innocuous everyday and domestic settings. Whether depicting a commuter train or public restroom, Tabaimo’s wry choice of vibrant colors offer an ironic contrast to the uncanny, macabre scenarios they depict. This approach allows her to reveal the darker undercurrents that lie beneath the veneer of polite society in a disarming way. This solo exhibition—her first with the gallery in six years—will feature several video installations.

SIDE CORE: CONCRETE PLANET

Founded in 2012 by Sakie Takasu, Tohru Matsushita, and Taishi Nishihiro, with Kazunori Harimoto as their video director, the Japanese art collective Side Core develops art projects inside buildings, in public spaces, and on the streets. The collective’s fieldwork-like methods include photographing highways, railroads, and underground waterways using special methods as well as creating installations with streetlights, guardrails, and road construction signs found in public spaces. Highlights from this show—the collective’s first major solo exhibition in Tokyo—include a new series of sculptural pieces made from materials salvaged from the streets and the latest work from their under city series (2023–), in which skateboarding becomes a means of exploring the uncharted territory of Tokyo’s underground spaces.

ALEC SOTH

Alec Soth is an American photographer who focuses on the landscapes and social context of the midwestern United States, where he was born, raised, and still lives (specifically in Minneapolis, Minnesota). Inspired by pioneers of documentary photography like Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, Soth typically depicts solitary and eccentric figures set against everyday urban environments and domestic settings in his work. This solo exhibition takes its point of departure from his acclaimed series I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), the title of which is the final line of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Gray Room.” The selection of works represents a reorientation of Soth’s practice toward a deeper connection with his subjects following a yearlong hiatus, during which he stopped traveling and did not pick up his camera.

Also on display will be Contemporary Japanese Photography Vol. 21, the latest edition of the museum’s annual survey of new talents and creative directions in Japanese photography.

MATSUTANI TAKESADA

With a career spanning more than six decades, Takesada Matsutani (b. 1937) has devoted himself to interweaving the expression, texture, and presence of material objects with the vital forces of life through his art. After gaining prominence among the second-generation artists of the Gutai Art Association in the early 1960s, Matsutani developed a body of work depicting organic forms shaped out of vinyl adhesive, still a novel material at the time. In 1966 he moved to Paris, where he began printmaking before going on to work with geometric colored surfaces. Recent years have seen a resurgence in critical acclaim for his art, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and in a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019. This exhibition will retrace Matsutani’s practice from his early beginnings to the present through works in diverse mediums as well as archival documents and video footage.

Also on view will be a group exhibition consisting of selected abstract works from the Terada Collection and the latest installment in the project N series of exhibitions featuring young artists, with works by Arisa Nakabayashi.

LOOKING AT ARCHITECTURE

This year’s annual Looking at Architecture exhibition will focus on the lighting fixtures in the museum’s interior design, which fuses an Art Deco sensibility with the advanced craftsmanship of traditional Japanese artisans. The new wing will also display lighting fixtures that recall the design and decoration of the main building, including lamps designed during the Art Nouveau through Art Deco periods.

SHIORI WATANABE

Shiseido Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Shiori Watanabe, an emerging artist whose enigmatic, scattered installations of tanks and planters, connected by circulating water systems and filled with plants, fish, and bacteria, have been attracting increasing attention. Often installed in abandoned domestic spaces, the artist’s meditations on the dynamics of local ecosystems and the relationships between nature and humans offer clues to how we might live in the future. This exhibition will feature a new installation that extends throughout the entire gallery space.

MODERN IMAGES OF ANCIENT CLAY FIGURES

Haniwa—terracotta clay figures that were buried with the dead as ritual funerary objects in ancient Japan—and dogu clay figures of humans and animals have long been important sources of inspiration for Japanese artists and designers. Stories about how modern Japanese artists and designers such as Isamu Noguchi and Taro Okamoto “rediscovered” the aesthetic values of these excavated objects, which had previously been treated solely as archaeological artifacts, have become integral to recent Japanese art and design histories. Focusing primarily on the art historical context, this exhibition genealogically traces the shifts in the reception and interpretation of haniwa, dogu, and Jomon pottery from the Meiji period (1868–1912) to the contemporary era.

KEIICHI TANAAMI: ADVENTURES IN MEMORY
EI ARAKAWA-NASH: PAINTINGS ARE POPSTARS

The National Art Center, Tokyo, is presenting an exciting double bill of exhibitions.

“Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Memory” is the first large-scale retrospective of the eponymous Japanese Pop artist, who has enjoyed a resurgence of critical interest in recent years. After starting his career in the late 1950s as a graphic designer for magazines and advertisements, Tanaami became a prolific producer of paintings, collages, sculptures, animations, and experimental videos. This exhibition showcases more than six decades of his work.

Concurrently, the NACT will host its first ever solo exhibition of a performance artist, “Ei Arakawa-Nash: Paintings Are Popstars.” The exhibition will feature new collaborative performances and installations by Arakawa-Nash based on paintings by other artists—from contemporary peers to historic figures—that will also be on view. The show will open with a participatory work, Mega Please Draw Freely, which invites visitors to draw freely on the floor of the NACT and was first unveiled at the Tate Modern in London in 2021. In addition to holding live performances throughout the run of the exhibition, Arakawa-Nash will also lead his own exhibition tours.

A PERSONAL VIEW OF JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ART: TAKAHASHI RYUTARO COLLECTION

Containing more than 3,000 works, Ryutaro Takahashi’s collection of postwar and contemporary Japanese art is one of the world’s most important of its kind. Takahashi, a successful psychiatrist who was active in the radical student movement of the 1960s, started collecting art in the mid-1990s when he took an interest in artists whose practices both responded to and resisted the sense of stagnation in Japanese society following the collapse of the bubble economy at the beginning of the decade. His collection includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, and Yoshitomo Nara, now all global stars. Takahashi’s collection practice eventually led him to identify neoteny (the adult retention of juvenile characteristics) as a theme that distinguishes much of recent Japanese art. This exhibition will juxtapose the personal perspective of an individual collector with the larger art historical currents that MOT has been tracing through its programming.

Also on view will be a solo exhibition of Yoshiaki Kaihatsu, known for his interest in the theme of communication in everyday life and social occurrences, and the museum’s collection display, which features a focus on female artists and a section devoted to the theme of the “gaze” alongside recent acquisitions.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: I HAVE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK. AND LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL

Over a career that spanned seven decades, Louise Bourgeois developed a practice that translated various emotional and psychological states through a range of materials, marrying psychological intensity with high formal invention. The first major museum exhibition of her work in Japan in 27 years, this show will present works from across the artist’s career, including prints, drawings, sculptures, installations, and writings. Among these, several pieces employ the recurring motif of the spider to explore themes of maternal love, healing, and memory, while a group of early paintings dating from 1938–48 will be shown in Asia for the first time. These early works, the importance of which have only recently begun to be recognized, establish the formal vocabulary and thematic concerns that Bourgeois would go on to devote much of her career to. As Bourgeois said, “art is a guarantee of sanity,” a sentiment that testifies her will to survive while also serving as a vital reference for life in a postpandemic era fraught with geopolitical tensions.

REI NAITO: COME AND LIVE—GO AND LIVE

Jointly organized by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and the Tokyo National Museum, “Rei Naito: come and live—go and live” is an epic exploration of the themes of transformation and flux and the interactions between humans and nature. Naito is known for her ephemeral installations that strike a fine balance between everyday objects, natural elements, and barely perceptible interactions and phenomena found within our environment. The first part of this exhibition, held at the Tokyo National Museum from June to September this year, was conceived as a dialogue between Naito, the museum’s architectural spaces, and the Jomon-era clay objects in its collection. The second part shifts to the seemingly empty space of Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, where the installation will represent the artist’s attempt to find an “immersion of life” in a place filled with natural light filtered through the building’s glass bricks as well as the artificial light and colors of the city outside. The two exhibitions are linked by a series of new paintings and three-dimensional works, including pieces from Naito’s series color beginning/breath that demonstrate the irreversibility of physical time.

JAM SESSION: THE ISHIBASHI FOUNDATION COLLECTION X MOHRI YUKO—ON PHYSIS

Initiated in 2020, the annual Jam Session project invites leading contemporary artists to produce exhibitions in response to the Ishibashi Foundation Collection. This fifth edition welcomes Yuko Mohri, Japan’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale. Mohri is known for her kinetic sound installations fashioned from found materials such as plastic sheets, dust, and rotten fruit. Her works visualize and give form to the unseen and constantly shifting elements that make up a particular space, such as magnetic forces, electric currents, air, dust, water, and temperature, opening up new circuits of perception for the audience. Marking Mohri’s first large-scale exhibition in Japan, “On Physis” will present both new and existing works in dialogue with pieces from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection selected by the artist herself. The titular physis, a Greek word usually translated as “nature” or “essence,” references the core problem of early Greek philosophy, which asked: What is the origin or principle of all things?

Also on view at the museum will be “Looking Human: The Figure Painting,” featuring masterpiece portraits by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and André Derain, and “Selections from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection Special Section: Matisse’s Studio.”