An exhibition devoted to Chiharu Shiota, an artist of rapidly growing reputation based in Berlin. Shiota embodies in art the memories we impart to objects and places, our sense of a presence made stronger by absence, and the anxieties and fears we encounter in daily life. The artworks she creates, as a result of discerning such feelings and emotions in her own being, transcend her own thoughts and powerfully affect the viewer.

The exhibition will present works concerned with “walls,” a theme Shiota has embarked on in recent years. The works arise from her experience of living in Germany far from Japan and her thoughts of how nationality, religion and other categories assigned to individuals are helpful aids for knowing others and ourselves and, simultaneously, unsurpassable walls preventing us from really knowing each other. The featured artworks will also include a boat installation prompted by her experience of the Setouchi region where this museum is located and a video work produced on the basis of interviews with children in Berlin. The exhibition will ask: Where did I come from? What is my existence now and where am I going?

This is the first solo art museum exhibition in Japan for Takashi Homma, who engages in photography from a neutral position without letting himself be bound by genre or methods of display. The exhibition is now making its third stop, having previously traveled to Kanazawa and Tokyo in 2011. Interweaving photographic prints with works of varying media—books, paintings, video, and photo-based silk screens, as well as an entirely new installation, this time—the exhibition demonstrates how Homma’s photographs commute between expression and documentation. Viewers are made to wonder, “What is a photograph?” in an exhibition that inquires into the essence of “seeing.”

Genichiro Inokuma (1902-93) was something of a collector as an artist. He collected things he felt to be beautiful or cute, whether waste objects discarded in the street or expensive antiques, in a natural way in day-to-day life.
His collection of “things” (butsu butsu) is now in the safekeeping of this museum. From that collection, stylist Miyoko Okao has selected certain items catching her interest, and photographer Takashi Homma has photographed them. This exhibition, then, is the result of their selecting and photographing objects in close collaboration, “muttering” (butsu butsu) together all the while.