Nudge

aaploit is pleased to present Nudge, a solo exhibition by Michimata Aoi , opening September 18, 2026.

To nudge is to prod someone lightly with the elbow. The behavioral economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein used the word to name a mechanism that guides people toward more desirable behavior without taking away their freedom to choose. Not prohibition, not punishment: a change in how the options are arranged. Since their 2008 book, the idea has spread to policy-making in many countries, and in Japan dedicated units were set up within ministries and local governments. Today, however, there are voices that doubt its effects.

The exhibition brings together a series depicting scenes in which an adult rests a hand on a child's back or shoulder. Gazes and hands are directed toward a step, or toward a raised place like a pedestal. Some hands lift; others are simply resting there. None of them are rough. The one lending the hand has circumstances of their own. It was not this adult who decided the height of the step. The one who takes on the urging and the one who designed it are not in the same frame.

Michimata has long drawn on Ikuta Takeshi's "Kafka's Staircase." Poverty does not arrive all at once; it advances the way one descends a staircase, one step at a time. In his letter to his father, Kafka wrote that while his friends climbed steadily, step by step, he was asked to take five at a time. The same staircase, and yet the steps are not imposed at the same height. It is on this point alone that the act of urging becomes ambiguous. A signal from the side for which the climb looks possible arrives as something else for the side that feels unable to climb. What separates goodwill from pressure is not the intention of the one who pushes.

Printmaking is a technique for transferring an image carved into a block onto paper. With each solo exhibition, Michimata has transferred onto paper the society in view at that moment. The staircase of the student years and the small step drawn now are different positions within a single concern. What the series shows is not a destination, but a present location that keeps moving.

References

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition, Yale University Press, 2021 Kosuke Nasu and Tsutomu Hashimoto, eds., Nudge!? Libertarian Paternalism, Free and Meddlesome, Keiso Shobo, 2020

This is Michimata's fourth solo exhibition at aaploit. We warmly invite you to visit. For inquiries regarding the exhibition or the works, please email info@aaploit.com.