The first work the viewer encounters is Yukinori Yanagi’s Study for American Art – Three Flags (2019), a deconstruction of Jasper Johns’s Three Flags (1958), made by way of an ecosystem of ants burrowing through painted sand housed inside acrylic boxes. Using the flag as a universal symbol of the US, Yanagi reflects upon the permeability of national identity through his once-removed gesture of double appropriation. That is, Yanagi’s appropriation of Johns’ appropriation of the American flag not only decenters the Euro-American narrative of pop art, but also destabilizes the outmoded role of political and cultural nationalism on the international stage. 

This recalibration sets the stage for the exhibition, which considers multiple formal and symbolic layers of cultural reception. The first room opens with Susumu Koshimizu’s massive wooden beams that take up the near-entire surface area of the floor in From Surface to Surface (Wooden Logs Placed in a Radial Pattern on the Ground) (1972/2004). The work, which consists of thirty wooden beams of Japanese Douglas fir that are each hand-cut with geometric precision, was first presented at Suma Rikyu Park in Kobe, Japan—the same site where fellow Mono-ha artist Nobuo Sekine debuted his groundbreaking Phase—Mother Earth (1968). While some of the patterns repeat, the work considers the gestalt of how the experience of perspective shifts as one walks through the radial lines into its empty center. The constant renewal of the body’s perception in space is presented in contrast to earlier paintings by Gutai artist Fujiko Shiraga, made with oil, paper, and glass, and Hi-Red Center artist Natsuyuki Nakanishi, whose works embody the painfully visceral aftereffects of war’s destruction—one that envisions the collective imaginary as a sutured topographic map in Map of Human (Ningen no Chizu) (1959). Yoshitomo Nara’s meditative poster-sized portrait drawings act like contemporary signposts: “NO WAY,” “Sekai o kaeru-natte [Don’t try to change the world],” or “Ashita-e [For Tomorrow].” 

In a second room, singularity and resistance, which have been synonymous with Nara’s prolific practice, take on renewed gravitas with Ennui Head (2020). The eyes of the sculpture are gouged with the artist’s fingers, while its whipped-cream softness offers an emotional ambiguity that is vulnerable and stone-cold. Nara’s intuitive sensibility for “ennui” resonates with the present moment. He plays a pivotal role as a bridge between the artists of the 1980s New Painting genre—represented here with Kazumi Nakamura’s Broken Hermitage 39 (Mt. Tatakai) (2018) and Yukie Ishikawa’s Impermanence 3—All that is Not Timely (2008)—and the younger generation artists such as Hiroka Yamashita and Yu Nishimura featured in this same space. The massive washes of violet gorges in Yamashita’s Shima (2023) are reminiscent of an ancient cave through which faraway islets are visible, suggestive of Nara’s internal landscape in Ennui Head. On the other hand, Tomoo Gokita’s Secret Game (2023) and Yu Nishimura’s montaged portrait, across the place (2023), are psychological interplays of both critical awareness and resistance to the genealogy of figural painting that has evolved over the past thirty years.

In the third gallery, Takashi Murakami’s DOB in the Strange Forest (1999) is a vivid display of mushrooms with hundreds of eyes staring back at the viewer. Produced right before his first solo exhibition at Blum & Poe in 1997, the painting features Murakami’s alter ego DOB [an acronym taken from the gag “dobojite dobojite oshamanbe” (Why? Why?) from the manga series Inakappe Taishō (1967–72) by Noboru Kawasaki], making its appearance in this strange forest. An important stylistic precedent is Gutai artist Sadamasa Motonaga’s In Orange (1975), whose comedic, anthropomorphic form is imbued with bold animism. The eyes, or negative space dots, of the “Infinity Net” patterns in Yayoi Kusama’s Abode of Love (2015) and Pumpkin (1999) speak to an obsession with perception and permeability, which Kenjiro Okazaki’s T-shaped paintings also engage from a different perspective through the literary legacies of painting’s formalism. In these acrylic on canvas works, Okazaki offers a reflection on the collapse of history, memory, and form through the present moment.

Perception is a central theme in the Garden Gallery, which includes an immersive installation by Ryoji Ikeda—his data.tecture [nº1] (2018) projects data along the floor, thus producing a floating field effect, including onto the bodies of viewers. The molecular data, which comprises hundreds of amino acid chains, are accompanied by pulsating, high-pitch sound frequencies, a familiar device that he used as an engineer and producer for the legendary multi-media collective Dumb Type (formed in 1984) in the 1990s. Dumb Type often probed the dichotomies between life and death and the role of technology in our comprehension of this existential border during the height of the AIDS crisis, where performers’ bodies took the form of noise distortion and surveillance targets. In Ikeda’s installation, data is transcribed into abstract algorithms that result in computer-generated imagery that is compressed, flattened, rasterized, and streamed at breakneck speed. This velocity is deliberately at a rate of hundreds of frames per second, which pushes our ability to process information. Ikeda carefully calculates this perceptual limit in which, according to him, the stream of images “can be slow, but if it’s too fast, it seems much slower. Ten thousand times faster, and it gets slow because it’s beyond your perception.” [1]

The upstairs gallery and den combine key works by seven Mono-ha artists, Koji Enokura, Susumu Koshimizu, Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Jiro Takamatsu, and Katsuro Yoshida, alongside contemporary ceramic works by Kazunori Hamana, Yukiko Kuroda, Yuji Ueda, and Akane Saijo. The viewer is immediately confronted with Yoshida’s Cut-off (1969/2007), a massive steel pipe stuffed with cotton that was originally photographed in the streets of Tokyo in 1969. Like a strange obstruction in the space, the piece offers a tension that is reflective of Mono-ha’s central tenet: probing the structures through which things reveal their existence. Takamatsu’s skepticism into visual perception through his shadow paintings were precursors to these bare arrangements of matter, such as Koshimizu’s one-and-a-half-ton stone inside an open paper cube; Enokura’s draped piece of black-stained cloth from the wall to the floor; Suga’s layers of felt or black cloth stretched around stone beams following a corner; or Sekine’s gravitational pull of a stone wrapped by rope and canvas. The relationship between the materials and their properties is continuous with the architecture of the space. Presented directly on the floor, the mountainous vessels of Kazunori Hamana and Yukiko Kuroda's Japanese lacquer vases, alongside Yuji Ueda’s and Akane Saijo’s glazed ceramic works, provide a tactile and textural counterpart to Mono-ha’s stoic use of mundane paper, canvas, stone, cotton, and pipe and contemplative structures that prioritize mutual co-existence over mastery of perception. 

Presented alongside this exhibition is a display of archival photography and ephemera, documenting notable moments in this thirty-year history. This project will be supplemented with two public programs at the closing of the exhibition, including an artist panel and a live performance, with details forthcoming. A publication released later this year will memorialize this milestone and expand upon the histories presented.

The second installment of the exhibition will open at BLUM Tokyo January 20–March 10, 2024. A final chapter will be presented as the inaugural exhibition to open BLUM New York in Tribeca, fall 2024.

[1] Interview with Mika Yoshitake. January 10, 2022.