5th Anniversary ExhibitionPlastic Utopia: Our New Ecosystem

Artists

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  Photo: Seiichi Saito

  KAWAUCHI Rikako

  Born in 1990 in Tokyo, lives and works in Tokyo. Earned an MFA in oil painting from Tama Art University in 2017. Using her interest in food as a starting point, Kawauchi takes as motifs the self and others glimpsed during communication featuring the interaction of elements such as dining, conversation and sex; creating works that revolve around the body, thought, and the murky relationship between them. In addition to drawing and painting, her practice extends to media such as wire, resin, neon tubes and marble.

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  KOBAYASHI Erika

  Born in Tokyo in 1978, lives and works in Tokyo. Taking inspiration from things invisible to the eye, and also from time and history, family and memory, and the traces of places, Kobayashi produces a range of research-based output comprising historical fact, and fiction. At the “Hirosaki Encounters” exhibition at Hirosaki-MoCA in 2021 she presented an installation unfolding around text. Winner of numerous awards including for her novel Girls, Making Paper Balloon Bombs, which deals with young girls mobilized for the production of incendiary balloon weapons during World War II, and graphic novel.

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  Yuichiro E. TAMURA

  A line, or alternatively, attitude, starting with the letter E, by Tamura Yuichiro, who constructs multilayered narratives mixing fact and fiction, based on existing imagery and objects and employing a variety of media. Works systematized according to attitudes in modern society toward the environment, economy, ecology, ethnology, and occasionally education, hint of eros or evil.

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  WATANABE Shiori

  Born in Tokyo in 1984, lives and works in Tokyo. Earned an MFA in sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017. Numerous installations include her best-known, Sans Room / Sun Room, consisting of tanks containing plants, fish (including endangered species), and bacteria, with water circulating between them. Themes include relationships between extinction, conservation, and eradication across all living things; the community of the nation state seen from an ecological perspective; and the workings of nature and human endeavor that underlie folk customs and festivals. Watanabe’s interest in non-human viewpoints has also led to involvement in noh theater production.

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  Photo: Shin Hamada

  SIDE CORE

  Launched in 2012, Tokyo-based SIDE CORE take a street-art approach to exhibitions and performances. Members are Takasu Sakie, Matsushita Tohru and Nishihiro Taishi, with Harimoto Kazunori joining the trio as video director. Driven by a desire to extend expression further into urban spaces, SIDE CORE engage in indoor and outdoor activities with a street culture slant, with the aim of unraveling the rules of public places, encouraging shifts in thinking, infiltrating gaps, and expanding expression and action.

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  Photo: Kenji Takahashi

  KUDO Makiko

  Born 1978 in Goshogawara, Aomori; lives and works in Kanagawa. In 2002 graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Joshibi University of Art and Design. Noting the unremarkable matters and moments of everyday life—the instant her usual walking route “suddenly seems to shine” due to seasonal or temporal changes in the light, places she has visited previously that spring to mind out of the blue, rivers and water’s edges, the scent of flowers, wind, the beating of insect wings, animals, adolescent boys and girls, nighttime dreams—Kudo reconstructs reality and scenes in her mind’s eye in painted realms akin to brilliant lucid dreams.

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  Photo: Ryoichi Kawajiri
  Art work: ©︎Yoshitomo Nara

  NARA Yoshitomo

  Born 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori; lives and works in Tochigi. After completing a master’s degree at Aichi University of the Arts, moved to Germany and studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since the 2000s has staged numerous solo exhibitions in Japan and internationally, becoming one of the country’s best-known painters and sculptors. Presented three large and successful solo exhibitions in Hirosaki in 2002, 2005 and 2006 at the Yoshii Brick Warehouse (now the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art) with the assistance of an executive committee consisting mainly of local residents, and an army of volunteers.

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  Photo: Ryusuke Ohno

  SATO Tomoko

  Born in Nagano in 1990, lives and works in Kanagawa. Obtained an MFA in Film and New Media from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2018. Sato’s art practice focuses on “narratives” that employ a lecture format. An interest in tracing Japan’s journey to modernization, and in the plurality of history, and fascination with legends and historical sites in various locations, leads her to undertake research and construct stories that move fluidly between fiction and documentation. Here she presents a new work based on her research for the “Hirosaki Exchange #06 ‘Bearing Witness to Shirakami’” project she took part in at Hirosaki-MoCA in 2024.

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  Photo: Seiichiro Sato

  SATO Risa

  Born 1972 in Tokyo, lives and works in Kanagawa. Earned an MFA in design from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999. Causes huge soft sculptures that are abstract yet familiar to materialize in indoor and outdoor public spaces. Sato makes these inflatable objects by hand herself, from constructing the model, to stitching the final work. She has also undertaken numerous collaborative projects through workshops in various locations that explore the possibilities for communication through art. Sato’s recent ventures have also included the production and translation of picture books.

• Artists from the collection

  Navin RAWANCHAIKUL, Jean-Michel OTHONIEL, FUJII Hikaru, OHMAKI Shinji, SAITO Lei, NAGANO Masako, HOSOKAWA Hako, HATAKEYAMA Naoya, WADA Reijiro, NINAGAWA Mika, MATSUYAMA Tomokazu