We will present a solo exhibition by Kengo Nakamura, who creates unique Japanese paintings that represent contemporary society. As the culmination of “Hiragana Painting” series—which explores the relationship between the visual and the verbal using hiragana as its motif—the exhibition will feature approximately nine new paintings, alongside some five works on household items as their supports.

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MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY is pleased to present Kengo Nakamura’s solo exhibition, “Words in Form, the Heart of Painting”. Nakamura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1969. He specialized in Japanese painting at Tama Art University and its postgraduate course, and has since been based in Tokyo. He has created unique paintings with motifs that represent contemporary society—such as emoticons in email, manga speech balloons and character silhouettes—as well as various images from art history. His major shows include his first solo exhibition at museum, “Modern Japanese Japanese-Style Painting 1994–2014” (Kakegawa Ninomaru Museum of Art, Shizuoka, 2015); two concurrent solo exhibitions, “Modern Lovers” and “JAPANS” (MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY, 2018), solo exhibitions in Taiwan (AKI Gallery, 2021 and 2024), and participation in the group exhibition “Scenery in Mock-up” (the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2021).

 

Nakamura has presented works that re-examine the value of originality—long held as an absolute in modernism of art—by fusing contemporary techniques such as sampling and remixing with the traditional Japanese painting technique of applying mineral pigments on Japanese paper. Examples include “Japanese Frogs”, which references a frog illustration printed on a toy box, and “Shinbun Itchi”, which reconstitutes Japanese emoticons used in emails. Particularly, in “Without Me”—in which he extracts silhouettes of crowds from Osamu Tezuka’s manga and reconfigures them like patterns—we see an attempt to transcend dualistic frameworks such as subject and object, life and non-life, and figuration and abstraction, from the perspective of anonymity. In this way, Nakamura developed works that bridged pop culture and traditional techniques, from the 1990s through to the 2000s. He has deepened his interest in the relationship between East Asia and modern art while revisiting the concept of Japanese painting in recent years. The new series “Hiragana Painting”, on which he has been working for years, emerged from these reflections. Although this series has been presented in several recent shows, this solo exhibition in Tokyo—his first in seven and a half years—will serve as its culmination.

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Artist Statement:

This solo exhibition marks the culmination of “Hiragana Painting”, a new series of paintings using hiragana as a motif, which I have been working on for the past three years or so.

 

“Hiragana Painting” is an attempt to combine the soft forms of hiragana characters to create abstract paintings, thereby exploring the relationship between the visual and the verbal. Having studied Japanese painting, this series also represents for me as a practice of re-examining the relationship between modern painting and calligraphy. The hiragana characters that appear on paper are not drawn as lines, but emerge as the “ground”—areas left unpainted. In other words, this is not “calligraphy”, but characters appearing as “paintings”.

 

Hiragana is treated as one element of the composition within these “paintings”. However, its form is never completely deconstructed into pure abstraction. Sometimes characters can be read, continuing to leave a hint of meaning. The simple dichotomy—where characters (calligraphy) are lines that convey meaning, while painting consists of colors and forms free from meaning—does not apply here. It is the ambiguity that arises between “reading” the characters and “viewing them as a painting” that this exhibition seeks to explore.

 

Furthermore, this exhibition will present works from the same series that utilize household items from IKEA and Muji as their supports. These works, which employ familiar industrial products as their supports, reinterpret “Mingei” from a contemporary perspective, while also representing a form of expression from my own daily life.

—Kengo Nakamura

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