Aletheia

Asano Miyabi works in oil painting and installation, addressing the asymmetry of the gaze as it has persisted throughout Western art history. Adopting the compositions of Titian and Palma il Vecchio, she mischievously subverts the sexual and economic structures that classical painting concealed beneath mythological rhetoric. Her work is grounded in sustained dialogue with sex workers, confronting their lived experiences. At the root of her practice is anger toward the misogyny that pervades both art history and contemporary society. MFA, Aichi University of the Arts. Born in 2000 in Aichi, Japan.

Positions painting at the interface arising between the material and spiritual realms. Retrieves the contours of unspoken dissonance, tremors, and presences stripped of substance.

Selected exhibitions include witch craft (solo, haco-art brewing gallery-, Tokyo, 2024) and Chiasmus (group, aaploit, Tokyo, 2025). Awards include the Excellence Award, 44th International Takifuji Art Award (2023) and the Special Prize, 9th Ishimoto Sho Nihonga Grand Prize Exhibition (2024).

Born 2002 in Yamagata, Japan. Tohoku University of Art and Design, BFA and MFA in Japanese Painting.

Ishimatsu Yufu paints plant motifs in mineral pigments, gofun, and sumi ink on Japanese paper mounted on Shina plywood. The image surfaces on both the wooden ground and the paper, drifting between layers. Loosening the transparency that Japanese painting has long granted its support, the picture plane sways with light and with the viewer's movement through space. Born 1999 in Oita Prefecture; MFA in Japanese Painting, Saga University Graduate School of Regional Design (2025).

MATSUDA Nayuko is a painter who works in stain technique. Controlling the process by which color soaks into raw canvas, she partitions the surface into areas the pigment reaches and areas it does not, treating the border between image and ground with the same intensity as the relations between motifs within the painting itself. Plants, figures, and landscape coexist on the surface, each remaining slightly distinct, and the gaze moves between elements, assembling its own reading.

Born in Aichi Prefecture in 2002. Graduated from the Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course, Musashino Art University, in 2025; currently enrolled in the same university's graduate school. Selected exhibitions include FACE 2024 (Sompo Museum of Art, Tokyo), Inter-University Five Art Schools Exchange Exhibition (Tokyo, 2024), Spring Footsteps II (Suzu Gallery, Tokyo, 2024), and For Want of a Single Needle (gallery33 south, Tokyo, 2023). Recipient of the Special Recommendation Prize at the Inter-University Five Art Schools Exchange Exhibition, Tokyo (2024), and the Encouragement Prize at the 49th Tokyo Exhibition of Art (2023).

SHIRAI Sakurako is an artist whose practice takes the relationship between seeing and being seen as its subject. Drawing on the kimekomi technique used in Japanese ningyō dolls, she embeds fabric into the support, forming a structure in which interior and surface do not separate. Shifting with the viewer's distance and position, her painting embodies as structure a state of gaze that does not resolve — where the active and the passive cross without settling.

Born in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, in 2001; based in Kyoto. After graduating from the Fashion Design Course at Vantan Design Institute, she completed the Oil Painting Course at Kyoto University of the Arts and her MFA at the same institution's Graduate School in 2026. Selected as a 9th-cohort grantee of the Kuma Foundation Creator Support Scholarship in 2025. Selected exhibitions include Artists' Fair Kyoto 2025 (Meiji Kotokan, Kyoto National Museum) and KUMA EXHIBITION 2026 (Spiral, Tokyo). Recipient of the Excellence Prize, Kyoto University of the Arts Graduate School Graduation Exhibition, 2026.

TAKAHASHI Misaki is a painter whose primary motifs are objects that have lost their original function — things that have served their purpose. She approaches painting not as the transcription of what is visible, but as the construction, from the ground up, of the conditions under which a subject can exist within the picture plane. Every point of the background, never given as atmosphere, is held within the same necessity as the subject. When function falls away, structure emerges more purely and its form appears weightless. Such a painting brings the very premise of seeing into view.

Born in Fukushima Prefecture in 2001; based in Tokyo. BFA in Oil Painting, Musashino Art University (2024); MFA in Oil Painting, Musashino Art University (2026).

TANABE Motoha works in portraiture, asking what it means to recognize another. She begins from dialogue with the sitter and extends her research to family, friends, and strangers who recall the sitter, selecting fragments from a photographic archive that can exceed ten thousand images, and weaving them into a single face. The materiality of the impasto on the canvas seems to attest to the sediment of time gathered within that single face. Currently enrolled in the Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Selected for the 5th Hoki Museum Award Exhibition, 2025.

Yasumura Hinako uses a technique she calls “summoning and joining” to piece together debris washed ashore from the ocean, reshaping it into a single form. When she applies this restoration technique—which involves summoning fragments from another vessel to fill the gaps in a broken one—to driftwood that has lost both its original location and purpose, time and geography from different origins begin to coexist within a single outline. Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 2000.