Painting and iPS-derived cardiac muscle sheet

Masaya Chiba’s Painting and Vegetable originated from a plan of his exhibition, which was set to be open in 2021 at Guimarães in Vienna—a renovated exhibition space that was once a horse stable. Although the exhibition never came to fruition, the concept evolved into an ongoing series. When Chiba experimented in his studio with placing vegetables, which are horse feed, alongside paintings in the same space, he noticed, between the two elements arbitrarily connected together, the “unique relationship in which the vegetables seemed to support and complement the paintings.”

Masaya Chiba created large-scale paintings utilizing multidimensional compositions up until the mid-2010s that intricately combined images, objects, and text. From around 2016–2017, however, his works began to shift toward smaller formats with more simplified backgrounds. At the same time, Chiba continued to experiment with refreshing the viewer’s experience of painting. For example, in his solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2020, the show was developed from the perspective of his pet turtle. In his Sideward Exhibition at ShugoArts in 2023, he created a space that evoked the sensation of the entire venue being rotated 90 degrees, generating a strong sense of visual and physical disorientation.

These installations were not focused on technology or the novelty of visual effects. What Masaya Chiba has consistently pursued is to expand the “spirituality” of paintings—inherent in their traditional format—into space and their potentiality to affect the viewer.

I believe the reason I am so committed to painting still lifes is because I feel like they are the fields in which we can allow ourselves to be perplexed by the world. Faced with a series of phenomena—arbitrarily named “the world” and laid out before us without explanation—people position painting as a space where they can be as astonished as they please, without having to be considerate of anyone.

—Masaya Chiba

The era when painting was the dominant form of expression is now long past, and one might say that painting finds itself in a time of solitude. Chiba appears to choose vegetables and objects as “companions” of sorts for painting, and by building relationships with them, he seems to be attempting to open up new exits from the closed, flat space of paintings.

Please come and experience Masaya Chiba’s ever-evolving adventurous journey in painting at ShugoArts in Roppongi.

ShugoArts, June 2025