Video and music: Yukihiro Sugimori
TYPO-ARCHITECTURE
Travis Young
Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Travis Young’s first solo exhibition in Japan will be held. We will feature approximately 20 new pieces, including a large-scale painting from his “Typo-Architecture” series, which merges vintage signage and graffiti typography with architectural structures.
MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY is pleased to present Travis Young’s solo exhibition “TYPO-ARCHITECTURE”. Young is a contemporary artist hailing from California and based in Los Angeles, also known as a member of Mad Society Kings Artist Collective. Drawn to graffiti as an escape from social norms during childhood visits to Los Angeles, he transitioned from street activities to murals, eventually elevating his personal narrative into works critiquing consumerism and centralized digital transformation. Navigating both street culture and the established art world, Young explores themes of rebellion, resilience, and transformation drawn from his raw personal history, expressing the freedom found within a life propelled by creativity. Alongside this, he contributes to society through large-scale public works. Young’s playful style, conscious of human and community connections, has gained a broad fanbase and led to cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Young’s “Typo-Architecture” is a bold series of paintings that fuses graffiti, originating from tags on walls and trains, with the architecture that serves as its support, proving his philosophy that values authenticity. Paying homage to the signage of the cultural golden age of the 1950s and 60s, he collages his own typography onto the canvas, arranging it to harmonize with geometric patterns, all rendered in acrylic paint. The ceaseless flux of people in motion, buildings demolished and rebuilt, graffiti erased or overpainted, shifting public interests – these perpetual changes are the city’s destiny, aligning with the essence of Young’s work. Meanwhile, the works possess an appeal as independent paintings, featuring skillful compositions capturing three-dimensional space and the accent colors inspired by neon signs, impressing upon the viewer the aesthetic sensibility he has cultivated.
This exhibition presents approximately 20 new paintings by Young, including one large piece of Typo-Architecture created in Osaka during the summer of 2025. Although some pieces were completed prior to his visit to Japan, many new works were conceived and created while walking through Japanese streets. Young was struck by surprise and nostalgia at the shop displays, the layered succession of signs, and the direct interactions between people. He created works where familiarity and novelty coexist by symbolically reconfiguring these elements. We look forward to welcoming you to Young’s first solo exhibition in Japan.
My work explores the tension between physical space and the digital world, with a long-standing focus on retail, signage, and the built environment as sites of community and identity. Growing up before the internet centralized daily life, storefronts and streets functioned as social markers—places where culture was formed in public, not on screens.
That early relationship with physical space, combined with witnessing the erosion of handmade craft through digital production, continues to shape my practice. During my recent time in Japan, I was struck by how alive and layered the retail landscape felt—reinforcing what is lost when physical worlds disappear.
The works in this exhibition are built through digital collage, using fragments of real signage, typography, and architecture to form what Megumi describes as “typo-architecture.” Together, they explore how place shapes behavior, memory, and community—and why preserving physical culture still matters.
–Travis Young
Dates
January 23-February 14, 2026
Noon-6pm
Closed on Sunday, Monday and February 11
Opening Reception
January 23, 6-8pm
MEGUMI OGITA GALLERY
B1, 8-14-9 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061, Japan
+81-3-3248-3405
info@megumiogita.com
Chain of Command
2025
121.6 x 183.3 cm
Acrylic on canvas
Lost in Translation
2025
76.2 x 61 cm
Acrylic on canvas
Long Game
2025
50.8 x 40.6 cm
Acrylic on canvas
Eyes of the Era 1
2025
35.6 x 27.9 cm
Acrylic on wood panel
Travis Young in the studio
Travis Young: Questions and Answers
January 22, 2026
The works feature a lot of gray and brown this time; is there a particular reason for it?
For this body of work, I intentionally shifted toward more muted tones as a quiet rebellion against the louder, primary-heavy color palettes I was working with a few years ago. Grayscale has always been one of my favorite colorways, especially when pushed from deep darks to soft lights and punctuated with minimal fluorescent moments. That restraint creates depth without relying on volume. I’m drawn to monochromatic painting because color becomes a tool for push and pull—guiding the viewer’s eye through space, form, and atmosphere rather than overwhelming it. When work is loud, the response is often simply, “I like the colors,” which feels generic to me. With muted or monochromatic palettes, the viewer has to slow down and engage with composition, structure, and nuance. I also love how this kind of work lives in real spaces—homes, offices, everyday environments—where quieter tones tend to age better and allow the work to exist as part of the architecture rather than competing with it.
Do motifs such as owls, turtles, and police officers each carry specific meaning?
The recurring motifs—owls, police officers, turtles—don’t carry a singular, symbolic meaning for me in the traditional sense just yet, (but that can always evolve.) They enter the work the same way typography, signage, or architectural details do: through observation and access. All of these images were photographed by me while in Japan, and much of my work is shaped by the source material I encounter firsthand. In the United States, that often means diners, movie theaters, and familiar commercial signage, which naturally became central to my earlier work. Being in Japan opened an entirely new visual language—new signage, characters, and imagery that felt both unfamiliar and exciting. I see my practice as a form of documentation, a record of the world as I experience it. Integrating these motifs isn’t about assigning fixed meaning, but about honestly reflecting the places I’ve been and the environments I’ve moved through, using the same process I’ve always relied on to translate lived experience into the work.
Could you explain about the “Eyes of the Era” series?
The Eyes of the Era series is a reflection on observation and the patterns that repeat throughout society. The eyes are painted gesturally, layered over structured pattern systems, creating a contrast between instinct and order. That gestural mark is rooted in graffiti—handwriting, tagging, movement—something immediate and unrepeatable. It’s a mark you can’t fake. For me, it represents how I move through and respond to the world as an observer. The eyes first entered my work when I began placing them over signage, as a way to suggest the emotional presence of business owners navigating the pressures of the digital era and the shifting commercial landscape. Early on, those eyes carried a sense of sadness, but over time I didn’t want the work to sit in a purely pessimistic space. The series evolved into a more standalone body of work, one that leans into bold, vibrant colorways as a way to explore energy, optimism, and color theory—while still carrying the same underlying ideas of watching, being watched, and documenting the moment we’re living in.