The gaze is not neutral. It carries weight, direction, and consequence—structuring what can be seen, who can be seen, and under what conditions. The exhibition Asymmetrical Gazes brought together three artists in their twenties—Asano Miyabi, Okoshi Madoka, and Kano Maashu—whose practices each locate a different site where visual power operates.
Asano works from within art history. The tradition of nude painting in Western art constructed a specific arrangement: male painter, female subject, male viewer. The model's identity—often a sex worker—was rendered invisible by mythological rhetoric. Asano does not critique this arrangement from outside. Working in the same compositional language, the same scale, the same stylistic register, Asano makes visible what that tradition concealed. The economic and sexual structures hidden beneath classical imagery are brought to the surface without abandoning the surface itself.
Kano approaches visual power through its contemporary form. In Kabukicho's host club economy, women constructed as devotees—hime—direct financial resources toward male hosts constructed as objects of worship. Kano paints these figures using social media information alone: images fragmented, filtered, algorithmically curated. The layered silkscreen process—base, print, paint, print again, sand—physically enacts the distortion produced when online information is superimposed on reality. What emerges is not a portrait but a cognitive condition.
Okoshi works at the level of the device itself. The iPhone functions as both tool and eye—a mediating surface through which physical and digital reality are continuously negotiated. In Invisible View, the same image appears simultaneously as large-format print, photographic paper, and smartphone screen. The gaps between these three layers make perceptible what is normally invisible: the deviations introduced by each medium, the asymmetries built into the act of looking through a screen.
Three sites, three methods, one structural question: when we look, what systems of power are we already inside?
