July 2026 Group Exhibition: PAINTING

Miki ISHIYAMA

石山 未来

Miki Ishiyama understands painting not merely as a visual form of expression, but as a practice that connects with the beliefs, rituals, and imaginations cultivated over long stretches of human history. Alongside paintings that seem to scoop up layers of sensation shaped by invisible beings, traces of memory, and the prayers and awe of people, she also develops installations using everyday items such as mops and cloth. By transforming tools into ritual mediators, she questions relationships between people and objects, and between humans and the invisible world. Her practice sheds light on dimensions of mental life that cannot be fully captured by rationality, bringing into view forms of spirituality that are fading in contemporary society, as well as unconscious realms latent at the root of human existence.

Rio UCHINO

内野 琳央

Taking as my starting point the idea of translating the relationship between a wall and a painting into a spatial context, I am experimenting with hanging paintings in the air. By weaving paint into thread-like strands, I create forms suspended away from the wall. The works exist while responding to a chain of subtle meteorological phenomena—such as gravity, tension, and shifts in wind and light—and, rather than obstructing the space, they allow it to pass through, continuously changing their appearance depending on the viewer's position and distance. In that moment, the sky appears not as a backdrop, but as a space where the artwork temporarily resides.

Takuma OUE

大上 巧真

By treating my personal bodily sensations as a kind of territory, I want to think—using whatever means I can—about how we perceive, grasp, and lay claim to space and place.

Narumi TSUBAKINO

椿野 成身

I explore, through painting, the state just before forms emerge within memory and vision. By layering fragments of architecture, human outlines, and interfering phenomena such as rainbows, I try to hold on the picture plane to a condition in which something is being recognized yet has not fully settled into a single image. What appears in the work is not a clear representation, but an image that moves toward recognition while still retaining a sense of fluctuation. For me, painting is not a means of definitively pointing to the world, but a way of touching the very process by which an image comes together between vision and memory.

Kousuke NISHIMURA

西村 昂祐

I create paintings using a technique known as decalcomania: I apply paint to boards or cloth, press it onto a support, and then peel it away. Through this process, the elements I place—dots, lines, and other painterly marks—are returned to paint as matter through accidental phenomena. I was drawn to the sense of absurdity in how a picture can be brought to completion by images generated from outside consciousness.

Fu NAGASAWA

長沢 楓

Drawing on images rooted in everyday life—painted ceramics, fusuma paintings, and folk paintings encountered while walking—I reconsider the nature of painting in East Asia. Images depicted on objects are not merely decorative; they carry functions and roles embedded in daily life, such as wishes and prayers. Through these images, people interpret and translate their thoughts and wishes for those close to them into something personal. My practice explores these images and the ways they connect painting to everyday life, human relationships, and acts of meaning-making.

Eri FUKAMI

フカミ エリ

The "humans" I try to paint are fragmentary memories of the world and of time—living creatures, wind, and sea. At times they are male or female; at other times they become mermaids or birds, each shifting form like grains of matter and existing everywhere. As beings who continue to change at a fundamental level, each of us is an atypical existence—different from the sex or race assigned at birth—and the identities that arise from that difference can, through being shared, become one again. We might say we are not "bodies with souls," but rather "souls with bodies." While governing the contours of the human figure, could it be that what serves as the vessel of the "soul" is the accumulated strata of life—stone, earth, bone, blood—the layered deposits of countless lives (the universe) itself?