１ Ayumu Yamamoto, "vase and sofa", 2024 |２  Kohei Yamada “Untitled”, 2023 - 2024. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery / Photo: Kenji Takahashi |３Rei Mishima "Hane no haeta nanika"

MtK Contemporary Art is pleased to present “young okazaki Vol.4,” an exhibition featuring the works of Ayumu Yamamoto, Kohei Yamada, and Rei Mishima, running from Saturday, June 8, to Saturday, June 29. This annual exhibition, now in its fourth year since its inception in 2021, highlights emerging artists from around Kyoto every summer.

This year's edition will showcase new paintings by Ayumu Yamamoto, Kohei Yamada and Rei Mishima. We invite you to take this opportunity to experience the evolving talents of these artists.

Ayumu Yamamoto

Born in Tokyo in 1995. Earned MA in oil painting from Musashino Art University in 2020. Ayumu Yamamoto depicts plants, animals, people, and various aspects of all things. She simultaneously depicts opposing relationships between intimacy and discord. Major exhibitions include “Mid Night Light,” Court Gallery Kunitachi, Tokyo, 2021, “Our Vacation,” Open Letter, Tokyo, 2020, “Shizuka na shokutaku, aoi tori,” HEARTY Gallery, Gunma, 2019 and “Dear, Shinai Naru, Shinai naru, Shinai naru” Gallery Face to Face, Tokyo, 2019.

Kohei Yamada

Born in 1997 in Osaka, Japan. Earned BFA in oil painting from Musashino Art University in 2020, then MA from Kyoto University of Art and Design in 2022. Currently lives and works in Tokyo. Major exhibitions include “Abstraction (re)creation - 20 under 40,” Le Consortium, Dijon, 2024, “Strikethrough,” Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2023, “Like hiding it" biscuit gallery, Tokyo, 2022 and Kyoto Okazaki Tsutaya Gallery Space, Kyoto, 2022.

Rei Mishima

Born in Kyoto. Mishima paints then cancels the painted image. In Mishima's paintings, the “decisions” he makes in the process of painting are etched on the canvas as vivid traces. These traces may have much to do with the artist's physicality, who was familiar with dance from childhood. The images depicted in his works, which deviate from the “meaning,” refuse to be easily interpreted, and the act of painting itself is proof of the artist's own existence. Major exhibitions include “anonymous art project ‘Collective 2024’” at OMOTESANDO CROSSING PARK, Tokyo, 2024.