Journal · Series
Exhibitions at aaploit
These texts were written alongside exhibitions at aaploit, a contemporary art gallery in Tokyo, by its director, Saito Tsutomu. They are not independent reviews. They record what became visible as we installed and lived with the works we chose to show, before it settled into concepts.
Exhibitions at aaploit
Reading a Story Without a Narrator
A review of “Storytelling” at aaploit, Tokyo. Five artists take up forms that usually come with a voice, and leave the voice out. What remains is our reflex to read a story anyway.
Exhibitions at aaploit
What Is Picked Up, What Is Left
One sheet was chosen, another was not. Set them side by side, and you still cannot say why. What happens here is not selection but extraction. On Tsutsumi Asano, "In progress - Unfolded" (aaploit, 4-26 July 2026).
Exhibitions at aaploit
Haginaka Mayu's Mezzotint
Haginaka Mayu works in mezzotint, the old intaglio technique in which black and white are raised from a copper plate worked over with countless burrs, then scraped and burnished away. This essay begins with the material depth of that black — a black that holds light even as it sinks, a white that shines brighter than the bare paper — and follows Haginaka's development from a maker of motifs into an artist whose true subject is black itself, pursued by varying a multitude of parameters: the gauge of the tool, the count of the graining, and more. In the large work Himono Escape, the sun-dried fish strung on a cord each grow legs and are rendered as distinct creatures, individuated rather than massed — a quiet refusal of the anonymity, the othering, that reduces lives to foodstuff. The gravity of the mezzotint black lifts this absurd, faintly comic escape drama to the threshold of life and death, until it holds a question of existence itself. Kin in spirit to Hasegawa Kiyoshi, who once re-created la manière noire through his own inquiry, Haginaka stands at a beginning, not an arrival.
Exhibitions at aaploit
Fictive Botany: Kumagai Ayano's Practices
The plants Kumagai Ayano depicts do not exist. What spreads across signs that have lost their readers is a vegetation that does not yet have a name.
Exhibitions at aaploit
The Ethics of Small Oscillations: On the Exhibition of KUMAGAE Yuna
Exhibitions at aaploit
Asymmetrical Gazes: On the Power of Looking
Asymmetrical Gazes brings together three artists whose works examine how visual power operates. Drawing on art history, social media imagery, and the technological conditions of the smartphone, Asano Miyabi, Kano Maashu, and Okoshi Madoka each reveal a different site where the act of looking is structured by systems of visibility, mediation, and control.
Exhibitions at aaploit
"I Am Probably Not the Right Voice for These Paintings" by Ishiguro Hikaru
In I Am Probably Not the Right Voice for These Paintings, Ishiguro Hikaru’s works are positioned at a distance from language. Made with cotton cloth, ink, and mineral pigments that settle unpredictably into the fabric, the paintings emerge from an encounter between intention and material agency. Modest in scale, they require close viewing and sustained attention, unfolding according to a slower, asynchronous rhythm of perception.
Exhibitions at aaploit
"Ken" (圏): Osa Seiichiro's Painting Practice
Osa Seiichiro builds the picture plane through successive layers of paint — not as depiction of depth but as sedimented time. The concept he calls ken (圏) is not a formal strategy but an ontological proposition.
Exhibitions at aaploit
Light Dwelling in Shadows: Tazaki Ari's "reunion"
In reunion, Tazaki Ari constructs a scene structured by absence. Empty baby strollers appear throughout the composition, standing in for unseen figures. At one moment, what seems to be a person resolves instead into a stroller through the logic of its shadow. In that brief correction, the viewer becomes aware of the act of looking itself—of constructing meaning from light, shadow, and surface.
Exhibitions at aaploit
Chiasme: On Seeing and Being Seen
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasme—the intertwining of seeing and being seen—this exhibition brings together four painters whose works return the act of looking to the viewer. Through shifting surfaces, structural frames, and unstable spaces, the paintings require presence and movement. The viewer cannot remain outside; perception becomes an entanglement in which seeing and being seen unfold together.