ITERATION
HAGINAKA Mayu, Inui Kotaro, ITO Rino, KANO Maashu, NANBU Yumeto, NANYA Yuki, TOMOZAWA Haruka
aaploit presents ITERATION, a group exhibition of seven artists, from Friday, August 28 to Sunday, September 13, 2026.
Printmaking emerged as a technology of reproduction. Wood, stone, copper, silkscreen: the form has developed through successive discoveries and inventions of technique and material.
In printmaking, one does not draw directly onto the paper. A plate is made, and the image is obtained by way of that plate. Between the hand and the image, a single plate intervenes. It is a technique of form-making that arrives at its image indirectly. The artist makes the plate, repeats the printing, and accumulates the judgments that lead to a single image. Within repetition the plate is deepened, the printing pushed further, the decision reached. Printmaking, developed as a technology of reproduction, has repetition (iteration) built into the process of making itself.
When the mandate of reproduction recedes from printmaking, the repetition that lay in the shadow of function rises for the first time as something autonomous. It is not released; it becomes visible.
ITERATION introduces seven artists who have chosen printmaking as a form of expression. For these seven, printmaking is not a means of reproduction. Technique, process, and the expression that emerges as their result are bound inseparably together, and repetition itself sustains the work as its concept. Among the works shown here one will likely find no shared motif. What runs beneath them is an attitude of attending to process.
The title, iteration, derives from the Latin iterare, to repeat, and means the act of doing again. The exhibition lays this word over the printmaking process of making a plate and building up impressions, and presents a present in which expression arising from repetition extends beyond the framework of printmaking itself.
ITERATION
- Dates
- August 28 – September 13, 2026
- Hours
- Friday, Saturday, Sunday 13:00–18:00 Viewings by appointment available on other days
- Venue
- aaploit, Tokyo
Artists
HAGINAKA Mayu
b. 2001
HAGINAKA Mayu pursues technical research in mezzotint, exploring the black produced by differences in a rocker's date of manufacture and degree of wear. Under heavy pressure, ink permeates deep into the fibers of the paper and deforms its surface. HAGINAKA's black emerges not as the color of ink but as the transformed materiality of the paper.
MFA, Painting, Graduate School of Art and Design, Tohoku University of Art and Design, 2026.
Inui Kotaro
Inui Kotaro works from the question of what it means to look at textile itself. Weaving structure directly into the canvas ground, he brings the linen support — ordinarily submerged — into the foreground. In screenprinting, deliberate mesh clogging draws distinct surfaces from a single stencil. His practice asks what becomes visible when dress code is stripped away. Completed MFA at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2024.
ITO Rino
The artist "counterfeits" the photographic image through silkscreen. Overlaying photography as a medium of reproduction with silkscreen as a technique of reproduction, the artist re-examines the boundary between "record" and "expression."
Graduated, Department of Fine Art, Faculty of the Arts, Kyoto University of the Arts, 2026. Entered the Graduate School, Kyoto University of the Arts, the same year; currently enrolled.
KANO Maashu
b. 2001
MFA, Painting, Graduate School of Art and Design, Tohoku University of Art and Design, 2026. Works are presented as mixed media pieces combining silkscreen with techniques drawn from urushi lacquer art. Though produced through reproductive technology, each work is completed as a unique piece—a process that operates as a metaphor for contemporary anonymity. The work traces the invisible relationships of the modern city.
NANBU Yumeto
b. 2001
The artist produces woodblocks with a laser cutter: a block generated without passing through the trace of the hand, combined with the bodily act of printing. The boundary between the digital and handwork is brought into the process of printmaking itself.
MFA, Printmaking, Graduate School of Fine Arts, Kyoto City University of Arts, 2026.
NANYA Yuki
b. 2000
Born in Gifu Prefecture in 2000, NANYA graduated from Nagoya University of the Arts in 2023. Working primarily in painting, NANYA explores how emotion resists fixed representation. Rather than illustrating inner states, their works stage moments in which perception falters, allowing viewers to encounter feeling as something unresolved.
TOMOZAWA Haruka
b. 2003
The artist works in monotype. By definition a monotype is a unique print that cannot be reproduced, and so it questions, from within, printmaking's very premise of "reproduction." The singularity of the monotype releases the logic of the plate into the corporeality of drawing.
Graduated, Printmaking (Painting), Department of Fine Arts, Tokyo Zokei University, 2026. Entered Printmaking (Painting), Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, the same year; currently enrolled.