The exhibition "Shapes" features works by four artists: Miku Tsuchiya, Yuri Nakazaki, Aiko Yamamoto, and Chiaki Watanabe.

It is said that the painter Morikazu Kumagai, by lying close to the ground in his garden and observing insects, discovered that ants begin walking with their second leg on the left side. This anecdote serves as a symbolic episode that reveals how the artist try to see the world. Even if this discovery may not be entomologically accurate, what matters is that the artist made contact with the “world” before it was put into language, in his own way, and gave form to that experience through his work.

The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his book “One Planet, Many Worlds,” suggests two ways of understanding the modern world. One is the “world,” the space of human lives, politics, and history, the other is the “planet,”the Earth as a complex system shaped by natural forces and deep time.

It could be that the artist contemplates through the act of making is, in fact, a glimpse of the latter.  Through artworks shaped by the traces of the artist’s thoughts and experiences, we come into contact with this “planet.” And perhaps the sensation we feel in that moment could be called a sense of life itself.

Miku Tsuchiya

Born in 1991, Aichi. Earned BFA in Printmaking from Kyoto Seika University.

The figures depicted in Tsuchiya’s paintings are both plant-like and animal-like. Conversely, the plants and animals themselves appear as human-like presences. This fluid merging of subjectivity   is reminiscent of a scene from mythology. Fiction in art is not merely a world cut off from reality, rather, it has the power to expand reality and touch its depths.

Major exhibitions include “The process of individual nodes” (node hotel, Kyoto, 2024), “gaze” (PAGEROOM 8, South Korea, 2023), “Swimming in the crack of light” (Printed Union, Tokyo, 2022) and “Things and perspectives” (kumagusuku, Kyoto, 2021).

Yuri Nakazaki

Born in 1999, Mie. Earned BA in Oil Painting from Nagoya University of Arts. Currently resides in Nagoya.

Nakazaki deliberately paints on a vinyl, that is not a material necessarily suited to painting, to introduce a sense of instability. Furthermore, the act of painting on both front and reverse side of this transparent material, brushstrokes from the past and present intersect on the surface. This interplay sets thought adrift through time and space, evoking the present as a liminal space between past and future.

Major exhibitions include ““Alive!”-BankART Station” (Kanagawa, 2025), “ARTISTS’ FAIR KYOTO 2025” (Kyoto National Museum Meiji Kotokan Hall, Kyoto, 2025), “Group exhibition "Volante”” (OFF THE RECORD, Aichi, 2024) and “ō fuku” (project space hazi, Aichi, 2022).

Aiko Yamamoto

Born in 1991, Kanagawa. Earned MFA at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017. Stayed in China in 2019 as a fellow of the POLA Art Foundation Overseas Study Program. Currently resides in Kyoto. Through field research in Japan and abroad, Yamamoto documents traces and landscapes where the memory of nature rooted in the land intersects with human activity, using colors derived from plant-based dyeing. By merging these colors drawn from other contexts, the artist transforms them into a state unbound by cultural identity.

Major exhibitions include “YOKOSUKA ART VALLEY HIRAKU” (YOKOSUKA MUSEUM OF ART, Kanagawa, 2024), “Arts in KOGEI / KYOTO” (Forest of Craft・Yuuhisai Koudoukan / Kyoto, 2023), “ART ROOM produced by GALLERY ROOM•A” (KAIKA Tokyo, Tokyo, 2022) and “Under 35 2021” (BankART KAIKO, Kanagawa, 2021).

Chiaki Watanabe

Born in 1985, Kyoto. Earned MFA in Oil Painting at Kyoto City University of Arts. Lives and works in Kyoto.

Starting from a subtle dissonance—perhaps better described as a core insight—encountered in landscapes seen during travels or in children's paintings, the artist repeatedly reconfigures the format of painting, traversing its conventions. This ongoing attempt to map the space around that dissonance and trace its source unfolds through a radically decentered and nomadic process. The resulting trajectory carries a sensibility of the world that resists concrete form.

Major exhibitions include “Tabi no e” (2kwgallery, Shiga, 2025), “PALALLEL e.g.4” (HANSOTO, Shizuoka, 2024), “Yanbaru Art Festival 2022-2023” (Oogimi Village Former Shioya Elementary School（Oogimi Utility Center) and others, 2023) and “memo” (Kyoto Seika University Kara-S, Kyoto, 2019).