ShugoArts Show

Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu City, Mie, Japan. She moved to Spain in the 1970s, then to Switzerland, and has been based in Germany since the early 1980s. Ikemura was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1991 to 2015. She has served as a visiting professor at the graduate school of Joshibi University of Art and Design since 2014. In 2019, she won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize. Ikemura works in a variety of media including painting, terra cotta, bronze, glass, photography, and poetry. She utilizes traditional materials for her paintings and sculptures, which contain a high level of spirituality and are highly acclaimed both domestically and internationally. The shapes and colors emitted from the unique texture of her art create images that blend figures, plants, and horizons, encompassing the fluid relationship between people, nature, and the universe.

Selected solo exhibitions: infinitely transparent, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2022; Nach Neuen Meeren, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2019; Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn, Sweden, 2019; Our Planet – Earth and Stars, National Art Center, Tokyo, 2019; After another world, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2017; …und plötzlich dreht der Wind, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 2016; Poetics of Form, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (Nevada), 2016; All About Girls and Tigers, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Cologne, 2015; Pioon, The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, 2014; i-migration, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 2013; Korekara oder die Heiterkeit des fragilen Seins, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 2012; Mare e Monti. Kolumba, Cologne, 2012; Transfiguration, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Mie, 2011.

Selected Public Collections: Bundeskunstsammlung (Berlin, Germany), The Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, Switzerland), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (Vaduz, Liechtenstein), Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln (Cologne, Germany), mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna, Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan), The National Museum of Art, Osaka (Osaka, Japan), MOMAT – The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, Japan), Pola Museum of Art (Kanagawa, Japan), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe, Germany)

Masato Kobayashi was born in Tokyo in 1957. He was the Japanese representative of the 1996 São Paulo Bienniale. In 1997, invited by Jan Hoet, he traveled to Europe, and continued to create works in various locations while based in Ghent, Belgium. Kobayashi returned to Japan in 2006 and began working based in Tomonoura, Fukuyama City, Hiroshima. He was also a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts from 2017 to 2023. He has developed a unique technique of applying color by rubbing it into the canvas while supporting the fabric with one hand, simultaneously stretching it over the wooden frame to bring the painting to life and “aiming for a painting that does not lose its essence by merely existing.” Kobayashi has prolifically produced paintings that possess a form and unique brightness that can only emerge from that specific situation.

Selected solo exhibitions: “About Freedom”, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2023; “Family of this Planet”, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2021; “Artist and the Model”, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2019; “ART TODAY 2012”, Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Nagano, 2012; “MASATO KOBAYASHI – The Paint of the Planet”, Nariwa Museum, Okayama, 2009; “Starry Paint, stars of outer space by pure painting”, Tensta Konsthall, Spanga, Sweden, 2004; “A Son of Painting Masato Kobayashi”, S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2001; “KOBAYASHI Masato”, The Miyagi Museum of Art, 2000.

Publications: Masato Kobayashi MK, HeHe, 2024; The autobiographical novel trilogy, Paint of this Planet—Under the tree at Hitotsubashi University, ART DIVER, 2018; Paint of this Planet—Duifhuisstraat 52, ART DIVER, 2020

Selected Public Collections: Iwaki City Art Museum (Iwaki, Japan). The Miyagi Museum of Art (Sendai, Japan). The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan). The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan). Utsunomiya Museum of Art (Utsunomiya, Japan). S.M.A.K. The Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, Belgium). The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum (Shizuoka, Japan)

Born in Hong Kong in 1978. Currently based in Taipei, Lee has taken part in residency programs all over the world, including the US, Europe and Asia. In his art practice, Lee utilizes various media such as projector light, videos, sounds, words and found objects, and his artworks represent the artist’s desire to continuously blaze a trail for new expressions of painting. Having been born and raised in Hong Kong, a city that has been susceptible to political turbulence, Lee has been conscious of the current socio-political climate. He incorporates intricate expressions to provide an opportunity for the viewers to reconsider their relationships with society and others, and the nature of his artwork is what makes his exhibition spaces site-specific, reflecting the ambience and emotions of each location.

Selected solo exhibitions: A blank stare like a gasp, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2023; Lovers on the Beach, West Den Haag, Den Haag, 2021-2022; (Screenshot), ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2020; Resonance of a sad smile, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2019; ‘We used to be more sensitive.’, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2018; The Enormous Space, OCAT, Shenzhen, China, 2018; Not untitled, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2017; A small sound in your head, S.M.A.K, Ghent, 2016; Hold your breath, dance slowly, The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, USA, 2016; The voice behind me, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2015; ʻYou (you).ʼ, the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013.

Born in Niigata, Japan in 1964. Maruyama currently lives and works in Tokyo. He has become one of the most important painters in Japan since the 1990s. The artist incorporates the stain technique, a painting technique using cotton cloths soaked with water and acrylics, in order to depict his motifs which are so soft that they melt with time and place. His paintings are figurative yet abstract, ushering the viewers to a plateau where there is no boundary between a subject and an object; in other words, the viewers become part of his paintings. Maruyama’s painting practice is bolstered by his diligent, rational and sincere research and practice of “the possibility of the spaces that exist only inside paintings.” He has been a Professor in the Painting Department at the Musashino Art University since 2000. Maruyama received The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technologyʼs Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in 2008.

Selected exhibitions: HIRAKU Project Vol.14 Naofumi Maruyama Kicking the Water: Sengokuhara, Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 2023; Kicking the Water, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2022; Lascaux and Weather, ShugoArts,Tokyo, 2018; FLOWING, Wooson Gallery, Daegu, 2017; GROUND2: Talking About Paintings, Talking About Seeing, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, Tokyo, 2016; Niigata Creations ‒ Museum in Motion, Niigata City Art Museum, Niigata, 2014; Floating Boat, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, 2011; Transparent Footsteps, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2010; the front in the back, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2008; Portrait Session, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2007; The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2005; HAPPINESS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR ART + LIFE, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2003; Taipei Biennial: Great Theatre of the World, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2002; MOT Annual 1999: Modest Radicalism, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 1999; 8th Triennale-India, Lalit Kala Akademi, National Academy of Art, New Delhi, 1994; Solo at Satani Gallery Tokyo, 1992

Born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1982, Takabatake currently lives in Tokyo. In 2015, she participated in an artist residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut in order to conduct research on Anni Albers. Through the physical phenomena of her materials, Takabatake has developed two-dimensional painting into an existence with a physical structure. While experiencing firsthand the magnitude of the world through the Lascaux cave murals and the Nazca terrestrial paintings, Takabatake creates her works through dialogue with materials, which encompass physical spaces that cannot be realized solely by painting images.

Solo exhibitions: LINE(N), ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2024; CAVE, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2022; MARS, Gana Art Nineone, Seoul, 2022; MARS, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2020; VENUS, Gana Art Hannam, Seoul, 2019; Fountain, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2018; Bathing, ShugoArts Weekend Gallery, Tokyo, 2016; Project N 58 Yoriko Takabatake, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2014.
Selected group exhibitions: ABSTRACTION: The Genesis and Evolution of Abstract Painting Cézanne, Fauvism, Cubism and on to Today, Artizon Museum, Tokyo, 2023; FUJI TEXTILE WEEK 2021, Fujiyoshida City, Yamanashi, Japan, 2021; TRICK-DIMENSION, TOKYO FRONT LINE, Tokyo, 2013; Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2013, Tokyo, 2013; DANDANS at No Man’s Land, former French Embassy, Tokyo, 2010. Public collection: Artizon Museum, Tokyo.