5 Exhibitions to See In Japan This Week: Picasso, through the Eyes of Paul Smith, Randomness Visualized by exonemo

1. Mathilde Denize: “Time and Light” (Perrotin Tokyo)

Where Fragments Circulate

Mathilde Denize works across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and the moving image. Born in 1986, the Paris-based artist uses a method of cutting up and recomposing scavenged urban materials and fragments of her own earlier works, probing the memory embedded in materials, the accumulation of time, and the processes of transformation. Drawing on the practice of feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann—known for her visceral, body-based performance—Denize treats the body itself, no less than painting, as a primary medium.

For her first solo exhibition in Japan, Denize presents the new Contours series, built from pigments left over from film sets and advertising shoots. Carrying forward the sculptural and bodily concerns of her earlier work, she turns again to the tableau, painting's most traditional format. Across works where the traces of materials and multiple temporalities intersect, she offers painting not as a finished image but as a site where relations circulate.

Mathilde Denize: “Time and Light”
Dates: Tuesday, March 24 – Saturday, July 4
Venue: Perrotin Tokyo (Piramide Bldg. 1F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 11:00–19:00
Closed: Sundays and Mondays

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2. Ayaka Endo: “Kanoko” (POETIC SCAPE)

A Story, Rephotographed

The photographer Ayaka Endo, born in Saitama in 1994, takes nature and domesticated animals as her subjects, using the act of photographing to probe her distance from and relation to what she shoots. Lit with strobe, her images dwell on the boundaries between nature and artifice, self and other, working through the photographer's relationship to her subject. In 2021 she received an honorable mention in Canon New Cosmos of Photography, selected by the photographer Yuki Onodera.

The exhibition marks the publication of the book Ayaka Endo: Kanoko. The sixth in a series that sets Japanese fiction and photography against each other within a single volume, it pairs Endo's photographs with Kanoko Okamoto's short story Sushi (1939) in an edited, hand-bound object. On view are the photographs collected in the book. The exhibition asks how a work of literature from nearly ninety years ago and contemporary photography come into relation across two different forms—the book and the gallery.

Ayaka Endo: “Kanoko”
Dates: Saturday, May 16 – Sunday, June 28
Venue: POETIC SCAPE (4-4-10 Nakameguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 13:00–18:00
Closed: Mondays, Tuesdays, and public holidays

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3. Natsuyuki Nakanishi: “A Study of the Glaringly Bright” (SCAI THE BATHHOUSE)

Ten Years On: Paintings and a Way of Thinking

Natsuyuki Nakanishi (1935–2016) was one of the defining figures of postwar Japanese art. Through the 1960s he showed repeatedly at the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition, and with Genpei Akasegawa and Jiro Takamatsu he formed the avant-garde collective Hi-Red Center. Painting remained at the center of his work, but he ranged widely beyond it. He collaborated with the butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, helped found the art school Bigakko, and taught a younger generation at the university level.

The exhibition, curated by the art critic Yusuke Minami, brings together works from the 1960s through his final years. Marking the tenth anniversary of his death, it includes—with the cooperation of the artist's estate—studies never before shown. “Painting is the study of the glaringly bright,” Nakanishi once wrote—a line that frames a practice in which, for more than half a century, he kept returning to the question of painting itself.

Natsuyuki Nakanishi: “A Study of the Glaringly Bright”
Dates: Friday, May 29 – Saturday, July 11
Venue: SCAI THE BATHHOUSE (6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 12:00–18:00
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays

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4. exonemo: “RandoMe” (WAITINGROOM)

Randomness and the Self

An artist duo formed in 1996 by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, exonemo has worked since the early days of the internet. The pair have crossed the boundaries between digital and analog, online and offline, the informational and the physical, making work on communication, the body, and chance in a networked society. In 2006 they received the Golden Nica, the grand prize of the Net Vision category at Ars Electronica.

exonemo's first show at WAITINGROOM in nearly three years, “RandoMe,” takes its title from a coinage folding together “Random,” “Me,” and “Rando”—slang for a stranger. The works on view, including a new installation, take randomness as their focus. A device called Hatch/et repeatedly attacks a random passcode and, the instant it cracks the code, destroys itself with an axe. In Connect the Random Dots, eight-year-olds of different races each used their own birthday as a random seed to generate a dot pattern, which was then joined into lines.

exonemo: “RandoMe”
Dates: Saturday, June 6 – Sunday, July 5
Venue: WAITINGROOM (Nagashima Bldg. 1F, 2-14-2 Suido, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 12:00–19:00 (until 17:00 on Sundays)
Closed: Mondays, Tuesdays, and public holidays

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5. Picasso, through the Eyes of Paul Smith (The National Art Center, Tokyo)

A Modern Master Meets a British Designer

The British fashion designer Paul Smith reframes works by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) from the collection of the Musée National Picasso-Paris through a sensibility entirely his own. A touring international exhibition based on the 2023 Paris show marking the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso's death, it brings some eighty works—paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and drawings—to Tokyo.

What sets the show apart is that Paul Smith has designed the exhibition space itself. From the colors and graphics on the walls to the overall layout, his vivid sensibility runs throughout. Picasso, one of the defining artists of the twentieth century, was an experimenter who kept renewing his style across his entire career. Here, that restless invention is rediscovered through the eyes of a twenty-first-century designer.

Picasso, through the Eyes of Paul Smith
Dates: Wednesday, June 10 – Monday, September 21 (national holiday)
Venue: The National Art Center, Tokyo, Special Exhibition Gallery 2E (7-22-2 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Hours: 10:00–18:00 (until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays; last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Tuesdays (except August 11); also closed August 12

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