Group Show Curated by Manami Totsuka | 4 October - 2 November 2025

As the exhibition title suggests, this exhibition features three artists: painter Eri Takayanagi, poet and novelist Iko Idogawa, and haiku poet Katsuhiro Takayanagi.

Each work exists independently, created without prior knowledge of the others' concepts and without a shared specific theme; the works stand independently. Whether verbal or visual art, no single work complements another. Instead, the presence of each piece is emphasized, transcending the boundaries of genre and form.

Viewers may constantly try to find reasons and questions, but as they stand in the space, something shared and something distinct may emerge, throwing them into a horizon of interpretation where anything "might be."

Options for interpreting the works remain perpetually open. The task of tracing the constantly wavering contours of “art” is entrusted to the hands of each individual viewer.

- Manami Totsuka, curator of this exhibition

Eri Takayanagi

Eri TAKAYANAGI (b. 1962 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo) has continually tried to liberate the "way of looking at things", a perspective habitually or institutionally constrained in a certain direction, by presenting the unknown through groping sensations born purely from the act of looking. Her approach does not rely on the frameworks of painting or sculpture, but often uses everyday objects and mundane actions instead.

As seen in past exhibition titles, the artist herself feels that viewing things while being caught off guard or "ambushed" (yudan) yields many discoveries and allows us to sense a connection to an underlying essence. The act of seeing objects or events is often subconsciously imprinted with countless pre-existing interpretations, such as aesthetic evaluations or social positioning. However, by engaging in the practice of seeing without intentional focus - almost like a form of rigorous training - she creates a practical catalyst that provides an opportunity to confront one's own unconscious.

Eri Takayanagi studied in Italy and exhibited in Hungary and Russia as well as Japan. She graduated with an MFA in oil painting from Tama Art University.

Iko Idogawa

Iko IDOGAWA (b. 1987 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan) is a poet and novelist that began writing poetry while working as a high school Japanese language teacher, an endeavor sparked by teaching contemporary poetry in her classes. She started submitting her work to specialized journals, eventually having her poems published in magazines such as Eureka and Gendai Shitecho (Contemporary Poetry Notebook). To free herself from the constraint that readers might perceive her work as based on real experiences, she subsequently began writing novels as well. For Idogawa, the boundary between poetry and fiction is described as being "very faint."

Idogawa states that she writes to counter the unpleasant reality of forgetting events and memories, or the difficulty of perceiving things distant from oneself, seeing or hearing them only faintly. As she writes in her work The Smile of Existence (Sonzai no Bishō): “what is visible also mingles with what is lost”. Within what is visible, there are elements that were not selected for realization, objects that are not yet manifested and are fading away. Her writing, therefore, serves as a catalyst for retrieving and establishing that which is lost, that which was not selected, or that which was unintended.

Iko Idogawa graduated in Sociology from Kwansei Gakuin University. The book cover for her poetry collection, Utopia of Doing and Being Done (Suru, sareru Yūtopia), features her own oil painting. In 2025, she won the New Artist Award from the Japan Arts Council for Fine Arts.

Katsuhiro Takayanagi

Katsuhiro TAKAYANAGI (b. 1980 in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo) is a haiku poet.

Takayanagi began writing haiku while in university, and later researched Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō in graduate school. He noted that haiku tends to avoid the direct expression of concepts or abstractions, instead possessing a tendency to let the "object" or "thing" speak for itself.

Within the constrained linguistic form of seventeen syllables (“morae”), he pursues the challenge of how to maintain a balance where interpretation is neither excessively diffused nor overly condensed, and how to evoke an interaction with others—transforming haiku into a dialogue that provokes conversation with others, rather than serving as a one-sided monologue.

The central technique employed is called toriawase (juxtaposition or combination). This technique creates distance from conventional language while connecting disparate elements, potentially opening up new perspectives and challenging established values.

Katsuhiro Takayanagi received the 19th Haiku Research Award in 2004 and published his first collection of haiku in 2009, for which he won the first Tanaka Hiroaki Prize the following year. He graduated from Waseda University's First Faculty of Letters, specializing in Russian Literature.

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Group Show Curated by Manami Totsuka: Eri Takayanagi, Iko Idogawa, Katsuhiro Takayanagi

Eri Takayanagi

Iko Idogawa

Katsuhiro Takayanagi

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