aaploit is pleased to present “Chiasme,” a group exhibition featuring four artists—Ishiguro Hikaru, Ishimatsu Yufu, Tazaki Ari, and Matsuda Nayuko—running from Friday, July 4 to Sunday, July 27, 2025.
The Concept of Chiasme
“Chiasme” is a concept employed by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, signifying the intersection between the perceiver and the perceived. When touching the left hand with the right hand, both the toucher and the touched exist simultaneously, creating a structure where the distinction between subject and object becomes ambiguous. Similarly, in vision, when we observe a landscape, its colors and light not only reflect in our eyes but also evoke emotions and memories, generating resonance within our inner selves.*1
This exhibition is conceived as a group show of four young artists from the perspective of chiasme. While the viewing experience of paintings establishes a unidirectional relationship where the viewer (subject) “sees” the painting (object), through the act of seeing in the relationship between painting and viewer, the world of the painting connects to the viewer, linking new interpretations and emotions—such a world of meaning. We attempt to create reciprocal artistic experiences.
In our contemporary era of advancing digitization, we have become accustomed to optimization through algorithms and unidirectional information consumption. This exhibition demonstrates the possibility of encounters filled with unexpected discoveries through viewing experiences that mutually penetrate the viewer’s inner self through dialogue with artworks.
Four Distinct Approaches
Ishiguro Hikaru: Layered Narratives in Paint
Ishiguro Hikaru’s practice extracts the interface from Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “infrathin” and develops her own interpretation. Her endeavor to explore the intersecting realm between the resonance dwelling in materials and the spirit that receives it emerges precisely from this attention to interfaces.
The motifs of butterflies, moths, and shells that repeatedly appear in Ishiguro’s works transcend the boundaries of material existence, symbolizing the fragility and circulation of life. The floating female faces appearing on the canvas—depicted as “precious children”—present expressions that could be read as either girl or adult, impressing as beings exploring the boundary between reality and deep consciousness. This intersection of gazes born between viewer and artwork questions the relationship of seeing/being seen and invites inner dialogue.
Ishiguro’s creative process, as Freud’s “work of mourning,” while starting from personal loss, sublimates that expression into a realm of empathizable emotion. The traces of introspection and resistance born in self-dialogue through the sign of “person” possess the scope to question the very nature of subjectivity in contemporary times.
Ishimatsu Yufu: Sculptural Dialogues
Ishimatsu Yufu creates paintings using traditional Japanese materials, working not from direct observation but from memory—a process that infuses her work with subjective interpretation rather than objective documentation. By introducing a temporal gap between the act of seeing and the act of painting, her depicted subjects become more abstracted than the original landscapes, allowing memory’s inherent ambiguity to merge with painting’s abstract nature.
“A Vessel Filling a Cup, Breathing Within” (2025) exemplifies this approach through spatial expansion. Installed on a staircase landing, the work responds to viewers’ bodily movement as they ascend, spatially embodying the “vessel” concept suggested in the title. Rather than concealing the wooden panel support as traditional painting techniques would dictate, Ishimatsu makes the structural framework visible and integral to the composition. Her painted motifs of grass and flowers extend beyond the Japanese paper surface onto the wooden support itself, creating a unified visual field where traditional material hierarchies dissolve.
This technique transforms the usually hidden wooden framework into an active visual element, equal in importance to the painted imagery. By allowing her motifs to migrate across different materials—from paper to wood—she creates a dialogue between surfaces that extends the painting beyond conventional boundaries and into the surrounding space.
The granular texture of natural mineral pigments resonates with memory’s fragmentary nature, while the visible integration of support structure with painted imagery materializes the intersection between concrete materials and abstract recollection. Through this approach, Ishimatsu reconnects contemporary art with the spatial intimacy historically found in Japanese domestic environments—fusuma paintings, screens, and hanging scrolls in tokonoma.
While employing traditional Japanese painting vocabulary, her innovative methods of revealing support structures and integrating multiple surfaces expand painting’s possibilities. Through the personal yet universal experience of memory, she quietly questions the boundaries between art and everyday life, creating works that breathe within the spaces they inhabit.
Tazaki Ari: Temporal Intersections
Tazaki Ari explores the relationship between contemporary society and natural environment through a unique pictorial language that dissolves the boundary between observer and observed. Her experience in wildlife conservation settings culminates as a perspective that depicts the mutually penetrating relationship between humans and nature in her works.
“Endless Circle” demonstrates the core of her painting practice. The goggle-shaped frame covering the entire canvas guides the viewer’s gaze into the work’s interior, reversing the observing subject into the observed object. The eagle hunting depicted underwater and the human circle reminiscent of “kagome kagome” manifest the structure of a world where natural activities and human activities are inextricably intertwined.
In Tazaki’s paintings, the human circle extending beyond the canvas and the goggle frame that incorporates viewers intentionally disturb the boundary between the artwork world and the real world. This quietly presents that all of us living in contemporary civilization exist within a “chain of influence,” while suspending moral judgment. Within this chain, viewers are not permitted to remain in the safe position of observers.
Through the nested structure of subject and object, Tazaki’s paintings question the act of viewing itself. We experience becoming part of a complexly intertwined world as both observers and the observed.
Matsuda Nayuko: Material Conversations
Matsuda Nayuko creates painterly spaces where boundaries dissolve by combining acrylic, watercolor, and rock pigments. The overlapping of materials with different properties captures organic growth and change in the natural world while generating fields where solid forms and fluid spaces coexist.
In “Yuri-shiro-iro no,” pink and purple faintly emerge within a canvas based on blue and green. Bold white spaces and intentionally placed “gaps” create room for the material presence of painting and the viewer’s perception to intersect. The color penetration born through bleeding techniques ambiguates boundaries between elements and harbors the flow of time within tranquil space.
Matsuda’s paintings resonate with each viewer’s memories and emotions through the polysemy of words and visual ambiguity. Rather than mere landscape reproduction, they are open fields as paintings where new meanings are continuously generated within the act of viewing. The organic forms spreading across the canvas quietly evoke the viewer’s inner stories while swaying between seeing and being seen.
Convergent Meanings
Each of the four young artists embodies this “seeing/being seen” chiasme through their unique expressions. Through works that respond to viewers’ movements and gazes, surfaces that change over time, and experiments with brushwork and matiere that resonate with bodily sensation, they provide experiences of not merely “seeing” works but deeply “encountering” them and making new discoveries through active engagement.
The group exhibition “Chiasme” by four talents—Ishiguro Hikaru, Ishimatsu Yufu, Tazaki Ari, and Matsuda Nayuko—will be a valuable opportunity to not only view artworks but also confront our own inner selves through deep dialogue with works. This exhibition, where each artist questions the relationship of “seeing/being seen” from their unique perspective and expression, should be an unmissable exhibition for all who seek encounters with art filled with unexpected discoveries in our advancing digital age.
For inquiries regarding the four-person exhibition “Chiasme” by Ishiguro Hikaru, Ishimatsu Yufu, Tazaki Ari, and Matsuda Nayuko, please email info@aaploit.com.
References:
(1) Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Takiura Shizuo, Kida Gen. Misuzu Shobo. 2017 new edition. pp184-186.
Exhibition Overview
Chiasme
Artists: Ishiguro Hikaru, Ishimatsu Yufu, Tazaki Ari, Matsuda Nayuko
Dates: July 4 – July 28, 2025
Hours: Friday, Saturday, Sunday 13:00-18:00
Please make reservations for other days during the exhibition period.
Venue: aaploit, 2F TMK Building, 1-21-17 Sekiguchi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo