Kaikai Kiki Gallery

Healing × Healing

March 18, 2021 – March 27, 2021
Gallery Hours: 11:00 – 19:00
Closed: March 22 (Mon) and 23 (Tues)

※This exhibition is now concluded.
Thank you to all the many people who stopped by.

 

Kaikai Kiki Gallery is happy to present Healing x Healing, an exhibition curated by Takashi Murakami, starting March 18, 2021.

We held a series of three exhibitions under the title Healing last year at Galerie Perrotin’s Seoul, Paris, and Shanghai spaces.
For each show, we invited several guest artists to join our Kaikai Kiki Gallery artists and presented their works, and each exhibition had an incredibly favorable reception amidst the state of emergency declarations and lockdowns.
When I contemplated how I might deeply connect people with the arts under the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic that broke out in January 2020, my indescribable experience became the source of my ideas.
 
Just around this time last year, a global panic drove a number of our projects into cancellation, putting my company’s operation under tremendous pressure; the word “bankruptcy” floated right before my eyes. I talked to management consultants, tax accountants, and lawyers every day and, having nowhere left to escape to, felt that I was on my last legs. My suicidal thoughts grew stronger, and I would sometimes open my eyes in bed only to wish I hadn’t woken up…
I spent around two months in such darkness.

 

 

I curated the series of three Healing exhibitions at Perrotin with works that were aligned with such feelings I had.
For this exhibition, I attempted to select works that seemed to descend to a greater depth of my soul; works with which I could communicate at a profound level.

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Healing Seoul installation view
Courtesy of Perrotin

Healing Paris installation view
Courtesy of Perrotin

Healing Shanghai installation view
Courtesy of Perrotin

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Participating Artists are shown as below.

Represented artists:
Mr.
Aya Takano
Chiho Aoshima
ob
Emi Kuraya
MADSAKI
TENGAone
Kasing Lung
FUTURA
Otani Workshop
Yuji Ueda
Shin Murata
Takashi Murakami

Guest artists:
Hideki Maekawa
Yuta Hosokawa (READYMADE/©SAINT MXXXXXX (Saint Michael))
VERDY
Hideyasu Moto
T9G
Shoko Nakazawa

Guest artists range from fashion designers and illustrators to figure sculptors and they are artists with whom we will be working on solo exhibitions and various projects this year.

During the week of March 18, many creative people will be gathering in Tokyo for the Tokyo Art Fair and Tokyo Fashion Week, so why not try and get in touch with the world of spirit at our venue? On the 18th, we will have some of the exhibiting artists present at our space for the soft opening.
Of course we will be adhering to mask-wearing, disinfection, and other coronavirus countermeasures followed in Japan.

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Below you will find an introduction of each artist, as there may be those of you who are still unfamiliar with some of them.

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Mr.

Lives and works in Shiki, Saitama Prefecture.
An artist with a career of over 20 years, Mr. debuted in association with the Superflat movement at a time when what we call otaku art today barely existed in contemporary art.
Early in his career, Mr. used to exaggerate his proximity to otaku culture, but recently he has been closing in on his inner qualities; by using hoarding and its rock-bottom culture as the background for the standing anime-style girl, he is highlighting a contrast between the ugly and the beautiful. 
As a recent trend, he has often been depicting a girl’s large, yōkai-like head in the middle of his composition, creating an ominous vibe. In the backgrounds, he depicts the suburban and industrial landscapes of peripheral Japan. These portray the country at the dawn of the bubble economy, that brutal yet nostalgic era.
Looking back, we realize Mr.’s work has been a big influence to both the art and the otaku scenes in Japan since.
In 2021 and beyond, Mr. has confirmed solo exhibitions at museums in Shanghai and Phoenix, USA.

Solo Exhibitions
2021 (Title TBD), HOW Art Museum (Shanghai)
2019 A Call to Action, Guimet Museum (Paris)
2019 Mr.’s Melancholy Walk Around Town, Galerie Perrotin (Paris)

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Aya Takano

Aya Takano continues to depict in her paintings themes such as the structure of a strange world, the fraying seams of society, curiously deformed animals, and the dogma of human desire, which in turn constitute her artwork.
Since 1990s to this day, film adaptations of 1960s hard-boiled science fiction novels, for example by Phillip K. Dick, have become the mainstream in Hollywood. That is, it took more than thirty years for the general public to unlock the labyrinthine contents of such novels. Likewise, the true value of Takano’s work shall become apparent thirty or more years in the future, when audiences will decipher the vast range of uncharted information which lies beneath its surface. Please immerse yourself in the paintings filled with the power to heal your soul.
 
Solo Exhibitions
2021 Apple Universe – Apple Cycle / Cosmic Seed, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art (Aomori)
2020 Let’s make the universe a better place, Galerie Perrotin (Seoul)

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Chiho Aoshima

Chiho Aoshima made her debut with a series of chromogenic prints that took advantage of her mastery of Adobe Illustrator but she has since gone on to produce digital animations, sculptures, and hand-painted works.
With imagery dealing mainly with Japanese yōkai and graveyard spirits, she uses dialogs with the extra-dimensional world to explore the extremely personal landscape of her own subconscious. As such, she has lived right next to cemeteries for over ten years.
Whether it’s cruel, catastrophic scenes of human dismemberment or nature expressing its rage in the form of natural disasters, her images are conceived in a violent array of colors and at times may seem the product of a brutal mind, but they are in fact her primitive response to the terrors of our world. In the past five years, in a major shift, she has been focusing solely on ceramic work as the medium of her expression.

Solo Exhibitions
2020 Our Tears Shall Fly Off into Outer Space, Galerie Perrotin (Hong Kong)
2015 REBIRTH OF THE WORLD, Seattle Museum of Art (Seattle)

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ob

In 2010, there was a burst of talents among the Japanese artists of the social media generation. They would discuss their works within their Twitter or pixiv communities focused on drawings, organize as groups, and curate and hold several exhibitions together. ob debuted with one such exhibition, wassyoi, in the limelight. “Wassyoi,” incidentally, is a type of cheer chanted at festivals.
In 2013, ob collaborated with Shu Uemura. In recent years, she has presented her work at a number art fairs overseas. An artist of a new generation who has grown up being familiar with games and social media, ob expresses a delicate and fantastic world with girls with big eyes as her motif.

Solo Exhibitions
2020 Spiral and Spring, Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)
2020 Provided artworks used as an artist character’s works in Netflix drama FOLLOWERS by Mika Ninagawa

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Emi Kuraya

Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1995, Kuraya is an artist currently majoring in oil painting at Tama Art University. In 2018, she held a solo exhibition titled Inside Outside at Hidari Zingaro and became a represented artist of Kaikai Kiki. This year, she will have her work presented at Art Basel Hong Kong and Frieze New York. With young girls as her main painting motif, she has been gaining solid popularity and her continued success is eagerly expected.
For Kuraya, depicting a girl is “an act akin to writing down what I feel and see every day in my diary.” She says that her work derives from the dark aspects of what she has touched and felt so far in her life. She is looking for ways to connect with the outside world through the young girls in her painting, who hold subdued brightness within their darkness and are also aggregates of various people and images that the she has seen so far.

Solo Exhibitions
2020 Window and Scales, Galerie Perrotin (Seoul)
2019 In Search of a Lull, Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)

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MADSAKI

Born in Osaka in 1974 and relocated to New Jersey at a young age, MADSAKI graduated from the Parsons School of Design in New York (BFA, 1996) and was a member of international artist group Barnstormers before starting his solo career. Sentimental while being sharply satirical, aggressive yet vulnerable, MADSAKI has been using techniques with graffiti influences as a way to express the frustration and sense of alienation resulting from his bicultural identity and to critique the value of art.
 
Solo Exhibitions
2021 (Title TBD), Galerie Perrotin (New York)
2020 1984, Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)

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TENGAone

TENGAone (b. 1977) is a street artist based in Tokyo. His alias derives from the notion of “Ga ga tenshoku (TenGa),” which translates to “Art is my calling.”
TENGAone grew up in a neighborhood near an American military base where he frequently encountered American-style graffiti such as tags and throw-ups done by soldiers who had brought their home country’s art movement over to Japan. This firsthand exposure to graffiti culture had a profound effect on the artist, and at the age of 14 he began creating his own graffiti using spray paint. In 2007, after having worked as a graphic designer and at a web design company for several years, he began his official career as an artist. His practice encompasses a wide range of genres including street graffiti and murals on commercial and public facilities, as well as sculpture and graphic design. His artworks have also been exhibited at art galleries and art fairs.

Solo Exhibition
2021 Doki Heads Tokyo Shibuya 1990 (tentative), Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)

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Kasing Lung

Kasing Lung is a former children’s book illustrator based in Belgium. In 2011, he started his collaboration with How2work in the hope of publishing a Chinese illustrated storybook and releasing a series of collectible figures. His first illustrated book in Chinese, My Little Planet, was published in Taiwan in 2013, garnering tremendous success. Since then, he has been releasing figures and drawing-style paintings, which are received extremely well; exhibitions are naturally becoming his primary mode of presentation. Kasing believes that the idea of fairies and elves first originated from Nordic myths and legends. They have been popular subjects in European folklore and literature for centuries and are regarded as one of the core European cultural values. His adorable character Labubu has received an overwhelming response from fans and has been released in over 300 different colors, styles, and sizes. Since 2016, Kasing has been focusing more on painting and drawing, enjoying expressing his favorite subjects in the art world.
 
Solo Exhibitions
2021 (Title TBD), Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)
2018 The Monsters Store, Pop-up Store (Taipei)

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FUTURA

Futura 2000 (real name: Leonard Hilton McGurr) is a pioneering artist of the era when graffiti was first officially recognized by art galleries. As early as the late 1970s, his abstract style demonstrated an innovative approach to graffiti— a response to the rules of the day which were primarily based on alphabetical letters. His canvas paintings drew attention in the 1980s, and alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf, he became a leading figure in a key art movement.
Futura learned graffiti on his own in the New York subway graffiti scene, also known as the “Subway School”. His skillful use of color, geometric compositions, and linework have been likened to the works of Wassily Kandinsky. Along with his good friends Dondi White and Rammellzee, Futura is also commended for his groundbreaking expressions of avant-garde dynamism.
The innovative elements of his career, techniques, and studio work are still seen as incredibly pure, despite their multi-decade trajectory. Futura’s creativity shines through the dynamic composition, raw texture, and completely original expressive methods he employs on the mediums of canvas, paper, sculpture, photography, graphic design, and large-scale murals.
Futura has previously collaborated with such brands as Louis Vuitton, COMME des GARCONS, CHANEL, NIKE, Off-White, and Levi’s, as well as various musicians—such as The Clash—for their album covers.
 
Exhibition History
2021 (Title TBD), Solo Exhibition, Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo) 
2020 Futura Akari, The Noguchi Museum (New York)
2019 BEYOND THE STREETS (New York)

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Otani Workshop

Shigeru Otani works under the name of Otani workshop and creates sculptures using ceramics techniques. Born and raised in a town close to Shigaraki, the center of pottery-making since ancient times, he has long produced his work at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park co-operative studio after graduating from university. After the success of his solo exhibition at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in 2016, Otani came to wish for his own space and kiln for his colossal works, and moved his base to a former roof tile factory in Awaji Island where he now produces large-scale paintings, enormous ceramic works, and bronze works, among others.
 
Solo Exhibitions
2020 Be if you can, even if you don’t have to be, let it be, Galerie Perrotin (New York)
2016 When I Was Seventeen, I Learned About Giacometti from My Art Teacher and Became Drawn to Sculpture—and So I Make Sculptures Now. Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)

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Yuji Ueda

Yuji Ueda was born in Shiga Prefecture, Japan in 1975, to a family of tea farmers in Shigaraki, a region known for its pottery and Japanese tea. He still lives and works in the area and continues to produce his ceramics work. Through his experimentations with various firing techniques, Ueda has created a unique process in which he employs whole blocks of Choseki feldspar, an ingredient for a glaze, or covers the surface of a piece with clay and fires it in anagama kilns. Since 2019, Ueda has started creating paintings as well, which have been received very well.
 
Solo Exhibition
2020 Picking Up Seeds, Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)

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Shin Murata

Shin Murata (b. 1970 in Kyoto) graduated from Kyoto Seika University’s Ceramics Department in 1993, completing his graduate studies the following year. He established an independent studio following his apprenticeship under ceramicist Yoshitaka Araki. After building his own kiln in Kita-ku, Kyoto, in 2003, he went on to hold over ten exhibitions a year all across Japan. Despite such a popularity, Murata stopped showing new works in 2016 in order to delve deeper into his craft. In pursuit of the ultimate harmony between ceramics and food, he founded a platform along with his wife Fusako and Takashi Murakami to exhibit and sell ceramics, calligraphy, and art. The store, called Tonari no Murata, opened in 2020 after a three-year preparation period. Kaikai Kiki continues to support its operations.

Solo Exhibitions
2020 From Muan to Kumagahata, Tonari no Murata (Kyoto)
2013 With Thoughts on Goryeo: A journey from Muan Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)
1999 Shin Murata Exhibition Gallery Nishikawa (Kyoto)

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Hideki Maekawa

Born in Awaji Island, Maekawa graduated from Musashino Art University’s Oil Painting Course in 1989 and went to France in 1996. He has been presenting his sculptures, paintings, and everyday tools in solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and workshops. Around 2006, he started his “Zōkoku (statue carving)” series, in which he carves felled trees from rural mountains into human shapes. Starting that year, he has held several solo exhibitions showcasing the series at DEE’S HALL (Tokyo) and Gallery Tamura (Hiroshima). He has published VOMER, a book on his sculptures, and a collection of stories titled Zuhre. Currently, he is serializing a small story in the magazine Sumu. He started producing the statue of Buddha four years ago following a dialogue with Murakami. Hideki Maekawa Statue of Monjusatsu 2020

Solo Exhibitions
2019 Kikunaraku, DEE’S HALL (Tokyo)
2018 Hanajin to Michiyuki, Gallery Tamura (Hiroshima)

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VERDY

Born in 1987 in Osaka Prefecture, VERDY first moved to Tokyo around 2012, working as part of the illustrator and graphic designer group VK DESIGN WORKS. Starting around 2015, the tremendous popularity of his projects such as “Girls Don’t Cry” and “Wasted Youth” spread his name all over the world. Today, he is a graphic artist absolutely essential to Tokyo’s street scene. Since 2018, VERDY has also started producing painting and sculptures. A solo exhibition at Kaikai Kiki Gallery has been confirmed for the near future.
 
2021 VERDY’S GIFT SHOP, Isetan space (Tokyo)

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Hosokawa Yuta

Designer for READYMADE and ©SAINT MXXXXXX (Saint Michael), Hosokawa was born on October 27, 1982, in Osaka Prefecture. He graduated from Osaka Mode Gakuen in 2003. In 2004, he established the men’s brand S’xprimer. In 2013, he released a bag from his remake brand READYMADE. The launch of the bag at a select shop Maxfield in Los Angeles, gave him the opportunity to build his reputation in the U.S. first. The artist then landed back in Japan and distributed his products to approximately 70 stores, both domestically and internationally, in mainly influential select shops such as GR8 of Harajuku, Arrows & Sons, and Ristir. The brand name, which literally means “ready-made goods,” is an antithesis. Reconstructed bags and apparels made from dismantled military surplus items carry a message of anti-war in a world where wars and conflicts seem never-ending. Riding on the tailwinds of Mode and Street, he creates a high affinity for hip-hop culture and is now a driving force behind Japanese street fashion.

Solo Exhibition
2021 (Title TBD), Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo)
READYMADE × NIKE BLAZER MID

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Hideyasu Moto

Born in Kyoto in 1969, Moto is an illustrator/manga artist. Since 1990, he has been working as a freelance illustrator. Later, he also debuted as a manga artist, gaining an enthusiastic fan base for his seemingly idyllic style of drawing that contrasts with his acutely poisonous stories and worldview. The artist has a deep knowledge of music and frequently writes for music magazines. Moto’s work encompasses commercials, magazine advertisements, and CD jackets. His main works include Recosuke-kun (Music Magazine), MOTOBook (Yoizumi-sha), and Moto Hideyasu no egaku yon peiji (4 pages drawn by Hideyasu Moto) (published by Ota).
 
Solo Exhibitions
2021 (Title TBD), Hidari Zingaro (Tokyo)
2019 MOTO JAM, VOID (Tokyo)
2018 Rock and Manga, Creation Gallery G8 (Tokyo)

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T9G (TAKUJI)

An artist living and working in Tokyo, T9G makes use of the techniques cultivated as a sculptor of toy figures and presents a number of works as a sculptor.Mainly using dolls’ eyes, T9G creates sculptures that embody a unique worldview. His main past projects include the production of characters for Tokyo Aoyama LOVELLESS, as well as solo exhibitions in Japan and abroad. A number of original art figures have also been released.
 
Exhibition History
2021 (Title TBD), Two-person exhibition with Nakazawa Shoko, Hidari Zingaro (Tokyo)
2019 UNWRAPPED group exhibition JPS Art Gallery (Tokyo)
2018 ARTIFACT dotdotdot Gallery (solo exhibition) (Hong Kong)

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Shoko Nakazawa

Having worked as a graphic designer and an illustrator, these days Nakazawa mainly focuses on creating paintings, sculptures, and sofvi. Her representative works include Salamander Kaiju Byron and Seedlas, and she has collaborated with figure sculptor T9G on works including Rangeron.
 
Exhibition History
2021 (Title TBD), Two-person exhibition with T9G (Tokyo)
2018 MILKBOYxSHOKO NAKAZAWA “AMPHIBIANS” MILKBOY (Tokyo)

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Takashi Murakami

I am the pioneer of Superflat.

Well, I’ll introduce myself. I am the pioneer of Superflat.
What is art? I believe this is an absolutely essential question especially for those of us who are born in Asia. Despite the fact that what we now define as “art” represents the path paved by Western art history, here in the East, we have our own history. This discrepancy has been hard to overcome, making it difficult to connect the two. In order for the artists in the East to express their firm position in the world and survive, we must resolve cultural conflicts. The theory of Superflat was my solution. Today, I am implementing several such projects aimed at connecting cultures.
 
The project in which I humorously named the period between Mono-ha and Superflat that overlapped with Japan’s economic bubble “Bubble Wrap” proposes a new movement that would further strengthen the Superflat theory in the form of publication.

The theme of the exhibition Healing x Healing is mobilized in the context of Superflat and Bubble Wrap in the contemporary art scene. The exhibition features a group of Superflat artworks that continuously move back and forth between the past, present, and future, indiscriminately merging high culture and pop culture; these are the truly free and creative expressions without prejudice or boundaries.
 
Exhibition History
2019 MURAKAMI vs MURAKAMI, Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong)