KOTARO NUKAGA

About exhibited works

KOTARO NUKAGA is pleased to present works by Nanami Inoue, Yohei Chimura, Mariko Kobayashi and Teppei Miyake. Inoue’s practice explores a distinctive approach to painting that seeks to eliminate the artist’s subjectivity through repetitive gestures such as drawing lines, embroidering, and sewing beads. Her works focus not on depicting something specific, but on the act of creation itself—producing paintings that “depict nothing, yet something.” Freed from symbolic meaning, her paintings act as “shifters,” gaining meaning only in context and suggesting a vision of transient universality. Chimura’s series The Experiment on the Origin explores themes of “herald” and “origin” through forms born from molten glass and metal interacting with natural forces like gravity. Both materials influence each other. Rejecting hierarchy between media, Chimura treats glass and metal equally, reflecting his background in both fields. This philosophy enables seamless fusion, emphasizing balance and elemental transformation in his work. Mariko Kobayashi employs textile-based methodologies, weaving together diverse techniques and materials to conjure a singular world through the layered interplay of color and form. The plants and animals that appear—evoking the relationship between nature and humankind—embody the many interconnections that structure our reality. Teppei Miyake explores how existence and absence can be made perceptible, excavating geological strata to bring buried histories back into focus. The sand he uses in his works is quarried in Chiba, a region that also supplies raw materials for the concrete used to reclaim land around the Tokyo metropolitan area. Encountering his works, viewers are invited to sense a cycle of time: memories of once-abundant seas, and the recognition that even the concrete beneath our feet will eventually weather and return to the earth’s layers.

Gallery concept

Founded in Tokyo in 2018, KOTARO NUKAGA acknowledges that contemporary art best reflects present-day society and its future. Taking particular interest in the avant-garde forefront of global art, exhibitions at KOTARO NUKAGA explore radical ideas of both Japanese and international artists. Now with three spaces in Tokyo— Roppongi, a cultural hub bustling with new ideas, and Tennoz, a location that is currently gaining traction as Tokyo’s new center of contemporary art— KOTARO NUKAGA continues to establish its name through the expansion and development of its distinctive gallery program.
Through a cross-disciplinary lens integrating various cultural and academic fields, KOTARO NUKAGA’s program aims to continue approaching art through its historical, cultural, social, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in order to interpret the past, capture the present, and imagine a boundless future.