Group Show – 4 Artists

Kosaku Kanechika is pleased to present the exhibition “Group Show – 4 Artists” at the gallery’s Tennoz location. The show presents works by E’wao Kagoshima, Ataru Sato, Tenki Hiramatsu, and Isaac Soh Fujita Howell.

This will be the first time for Kosaku Kanechika to present the works of E’wao Kagoshima and Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, who are based in New York.

Born in Niigata Prefecture and raised in Tokyo, E’wao Kagoshima studied metalcraft until his early twenties at the suggestion of his uncle, a lacquer artist. In the 1970s, he relocated to New York, where he has remained an active presence in the city’s avant-garde art scene for several decades. Throughout his career, Kagoshima has worked across a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, and collage. Distinguished by his exceptional draftsmanship and keen sensitivity to color, his practice effortlessly transcends the boundaries between artistic mediums as well as the divide between the figurative and the abstract. Infused with wit, playfulness, and humor, his works draw inspiration from subtle discoveries embedded in everyday life, giving form to dreamlike worlds that are at once sensual and unsettling.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell investigates twenty-first century discontent, self-isolationism and social-media malaise. He explores these themes by taking cues from authors like Vladimir Sorokin and Olaf Stapledon, who rely on post-apocalyptic fables and interstellar sci-fi narratives to critique socio-political torments. With each exhibition, he creates a loose narrative framework featuring stiff, at times cybernetic, figures with a backdrop of dark, wired spaces and machines. Sometimes, the figures appear to be participants in a seemingly clandestine operation, spying through mechanical peepholes and ultra-zoom cameras, and wielding speculative listening devices. At other times, they appear to be space travelers witnessing civilization vanishing among a dystopian landscape of technological waste.

For Ataru Sato, drawing and painting are tools to chronicle and interpret the complexity of human life around him, exploring personal themes in strikingly honest and at times provocative imagery. He sees art as being created by people who are alive to express their lived experiences and has no aspiration to create art for art’s sake, art that is novel, or art that seeks to be meaningful. Sato refuses to shy away from fantasies, shame, loneliness, pain, or indulgences, matters that are typically considered indecent or immoral but are nonetheless integral aspects of the psyche. He opens a direct portal into a psychological investigation of his lived experience.

Tenki Hiramatsu‘s paintings begin without specific motifs, and figures subsequently emerge from applying and reworking oil paint over weeks or months, rotating the work in 90° increments. Figures materialize from the depths of initially unrelated backgrounds and traces of brushstrokes, as abstract compositions and colors respond to one another. Hiramatsu describes his creative process as an exploration of existence without purpose.

This exhibition features E’wao Kagoshima’s vibrant, pop-inspired works from the 2010s alongside a new painting and drawing by Isaac Soh Fujita Howell. Completing the presentation, Ataru Sato and Tenki Hiramatsu showcase recent works being presented in Japan for the first time. The gallery also plans to host solo exhibitions by Kagoshima and Howell next year.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11 am – 6 pm

Exhibition Duration 29.08. – 03.10.2026

www.kosakukanechika.com

Location:
Kosaku Kanechika
TERRADA Art Complex 5F, 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku
140-0002 Tokyo
Japan