Nakahara Chihiro　Exhibition
"The Nights Prayer Circle"

The Nights Prayer Circle
mixed media 2025

13 Dec. Sat. 2025 - 31 Jan. Sat. 2026
*Closed on Sundays, Mondays, National Holidays
*Closed for winter；2025.12.28 - 2026.1.5

Reception Party: 12.13 (Sat.) 15:00 - 18:00

Kyoto Seika University
Department of Illustration
3rd grade Visual art Project Exhibition

27 Jan.Tue.- 1 Feb.Sun.2026

Kansai Shinsho Exhibition

3 Feb.Tue.- 8 Feb.Sun.2026

Mainichi Wartime Photographs project

10 Feb.Tue.- 22 Feb.Sun.2026

“gaze and pointing”
Anna Yamanishi Solo Exhibition

Breeze 2025
©Anna Yamanishi
Photo by Takeru Koroda

1 Feb. Sun.– 28 Feb. Sat. 2026
open on Fri ., Sat., & Sun. 12:00-18:00
appointments are available on weekdays
free admission

Pointing—directing a finger at something—is often described as the first form of communication infants use before language. Neither a direct bodily action such as touching or grasping, nor an objective verbal expression, pointing exists in between. I am drawn to the particular distance it creates between the self and the world.

When making work, I closely observe what I am trying to perceive in an object and how my chosen form shapes the way I see the world. Through this careful observation, different layers of reality come into view. Perhaps this is the pleasure of rediscovering, from the outside, the transparent contours of the world once seen during the infant “pointing” stage.

I studied lacquerware in the crafts department at university. Because lacquer is a liquid, it requires a form, and I began by working with wood, a material I loved. However, applying a coating to the surface never felt quite right to me. Looking back, I understand this as a difficulty in prioritizing either form or surface—two inseparable aspects.

This experience led to my ongoing interest in the relationship between form and surface. Through my practice, I consider the fact that we can only ever see surfaces, and the questions of presence and absence that inevitably accompany them.

Anna Yamanishi

“Gaze and Pointing” is a solo exhibition by Anna Yamanishi that focuses on an early, formative stage of our relationship with the world around us – one that cannot be fully reduced to direct physical contact or verbal explanation. Rather than presenting the works as mere sculptural objects, the exhibition establishes them as a site for reconsidering perception itself.

The careful examination of what is brought into focus and through what kind of form the world is framed resembles less an act of shaping toward a predetermined result than an attempt to subtly shift the conditions of perception, one by one. The works that emerge from this process do not assert clear meanings or symbols. Instead, they remain suspended at a stage prior to the formation of understanding on the part of the viewer.

With a background studying in the field of traditional Japanese lacquerware craftsmanship, Yamanishi encountered early on the difficulty of treating structure and surface as separable entities. Her commitment to engaging “form” and “surface” on equal terms marks a deliberate distance from conventional methodologies that define sculpture as a self-contained, autonomous mass. Rather, her practice can be understood as an effort to reframe sculptural form as a perceptual phenomenon.

Yamanishi’s works exist simultaneously as wood carvings – objects with a tangible material presence – and as unstable states that incorporate a sense of openness and indeterminacy. They function as mediating devices that call into question not only the viewer’s assumptions and habits of perception, but also the reliance on outward appearance through which we habitually make sense of the world.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the point at which seeing begins and to experience the repeated acts of “gazing and pointing” as acts that unsettle the distance we unconsciously assume between ourselves and objects, as well as the presumed transparency of perception itself.

eN arts

KOSUGI＋ANDO Exhibition

16 Jan. Fri.– 31 Jan.Sat. 2026

GENDAI BIJYUTSU NITOHEY　Exhibition

12 Dec.Sat.– 27 Dec. Sat.2025
7.Jan.Wed. – 12.Jan. Mon.2026

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS
Teppei Kaneuji and the constructions:
tower (UNIVERSITY)

Photo:Kazuki Yoshimoto

13 Dec.Sat.2025 〜 15 Feb.Sun.2026
Closed on December 15, 22, 27–January 5, 13, 19, 23–26, February 2

Organized by
　Kyoto City University of Arts
With additional funding from
　Program for Cultural and Art Promotion Utilizing
UniversitiesWith the cooperation of
Participants of the project TOPOS:
　An Art School as a "Garden" for
　Mutual Learning
　dot architects
　Art Front Gallery
　Yumiko Chiba Associates
Coordinated by
　TOPOS: An Art School as a "Garden" for 　Mutual Learning
　Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery
Curated by
　Mizuho Fujita (Chief Curator/Program 　Director, KCUA Art Gallery)

Artist Profiles

Teppei Kaneuji
Born in 1978, Teppei Kaneuji is an artist and sculptor who lives and works in Kyoto. He earned a graduate degree in sculpture at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2003, where he now teaches as the Associate Professor. He uses things around him as materials for his works, altering their meaning via a collage method that involves cutting off parts and attaching them elsewhere. He has done solo exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art (2009), the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2013), Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), and at other venues inside and outside Japan. Since 2011, he has also worked on set design and produced theatrical works in 2012. He received Kyoto City’s Best Young Artist Award in 2012, and the Kyoto Prefecture Culture Prize Award in 2015, and The 29th Takashimaya Art Prize in 2018. https://teppeikaneuji.site/

the constructions

Cast:
Masamitsu Araki
Kazumichi Komatsu
contact Gonzo (Yuya Tsukahara, Ayaka Fujita, Keigo Mikajiri, Takuya Matsumi)
dot architects (Wataru Doi, Futo Kurahashi, Ryosuke Katsube, Eisuke Hirai)
Participants in Program C and staff members of TOPOS: The Art University as a Garden for Mutual Learning
(Mio Arai, Taisuke Asami, Mizuho Fujita, Aio Fukudome, Sawaka Furuno, Goku Hasama, Ryosuke Higo, Toshichika Kamon, Masahiro Katata, Rei Nakao, Natsuki Seta, Atsushi Tsukamoto, Sachiko Uchiyama, Natsuki Yamamoto)
Costumes: Kyoko Fujitani
Photography: Katayama Tatsuki and Kazuki Yoshimoto
Transportation: Kameoka Distribution Center Co., Ltd. (Takahisa Hitomi)

Venue setup and artworks packaging: Seido Ikeda, Atsushi Tsukamoto, Mitsuhiro Kishimoto, Chikara Masuyama, Yosuke Yano, and staff members of KCUA Art Gallery andTOPOS: The Art University as a Garden for Mutual Learning (Mizuho Fujita, Ryosuke Higo, Miharu Seta, Sachiko Uchiyama, Natsuki Yamamoto, Kazuki Yoshimoto)

...and more! (Updated December 8, 2025)

UNDULATIONISM Ⅻ
Aki KURODA　　Hitoshi KOYANAGI
Tsuyoshi SERA　　Ryota HAMASAKI

8 Nov. Sat- 30 Nov. Sun. 2025
OPEN 12:00 - 18:00
Closed on Mon, Tue, National holidays

〈1F〉
KIMIETO Exhibition
The joint exhibition of traditional
Japanese-style painting

27 Jan. Tue.- 1 Feb. Sun.2026

〈2F〉
Megumi EGAWA Exhibition

27 Jan. Tue.- 1 Feb. Sun.2026

〈Back Yard〉
Saya KUSUI Solo Exhibition
The Leaning tree

12 Jan. Mon.- 14 Jun. Sun.2026

New Mutation #6
Yukari Inoue
Soh Souen
Mal Takada

Yukari Inoue

Soh Souen

Mal Takada

17 Jan.Fri. - 15 Mar.Sun.2026

Taizo Mori
（feat.MUGYUDA Hyogo）

photo:Hyogo Mugyuda

20 Nov.Thu.2025 - 27 Feb.Fri.2026

Permanent exhibition

We are now taking the style of apointment only,
Before when you visit for us, Please contact for following mail address.
GALLERY TOMO

Artists:
Taisuke Kondouh, Takeshi Shinohara, Koosuk,
Tsutomu Ishihara, Kazutaka Sugitani, Caori Fujita,
Moeko Machida, Shinya Yamamoto, Takami Miyaoka,
Nobuyasu Yoshida, Minori Ieyama

HASHIMOTO Rio solo exhibition
1/X

27 Jan. Tue.– 1 Feb. Sun. 2026

HASHIMOTO Rio (b.1998, Shiga pref, lives and works in Kansai) is an artist who explores the boundary between ugliness and beauty using lacquer.
She earned her master's degree in a URUSHI / lacquer course at Kyoto city University of the Arts.

〈1F〉
ISHIKAWA Aiko Exhibition
FOREST WALK

27 Jan. Tue.– 1 Feb. Sun. 2026

〈2F〉
SAKAGUCHI Mahiro Exhibition

27 Jan. Tue.– 1 Feb. Sun. 2026

NAKAJIMA Ippei　Exhibition
Painting in progressive tense

31 Jan.Sat.– 22 Feb. Sun.2026

Spiros Baras Solo Exhibition
“Longing For Summer”

Kamo River 2025

Rocks 2025

2 Dec.Tue. – 14 Dec. Sun. 2025
11:00 ～ 18:00 Monday closed

The exhibition will feature works by the Greek artist Spiros Baras, including pencil drawings and several watercolors. The drawings by Spiros Baras reveal a world of soft restraint and luminous stillness. Executed with colored pencils on textured paper, they share a distinctive delicacy, a refusal of heaviness, of shadow, of noise. The artist builds the image through countless fine layers, allowing color to breathe through paper rather than sit on top of it.

His subjects range from island landscapes and architectural views to intimate portraits and gentle scenes of daily life. Each appears distilled to its essential tone, sea, hill, skin, or air, suspended in a timeless calm. The light is diffuse, Mediterranean yet introspective, and the figures seem to inhabit a space between memory and dream.
Despite their simplicity, the drawings contain a precise emotional charge: a faint melancholy, a longing that resonates with the exhibition title “Longing for Summer.” They evoke moments when the world slows down, a cat sleeping, a woman lost in thought, a church glowing on a distant hill, and invite the viewer into that same hush.
Baras’s minimal palette and deliberate flatness echo early modernist sensibilities, yet his atmosphere is unmistakably personal, contemplative, humane, and deeply tender.
Baras’s watercolors could also be seen as a meditation on transience, on how light touches the world for an instant before disappearing.

Within the context of the contemporary art scene, Spiros Baras occupies a distinctive position, one that resists spectacle, digital excess, and conceptual overstatement. His work reclaims drawing as a meditative, sensorial act, standing in deliberate contrast to the acceleration and visual saturation of contemporary image culture.
At first glance, his compositions may appear aligned with minimal realism or post-minimal figuration, yet their ethos is more poetic than stylistic. The absence of shadow, the restraint of color, and the near monastic precision of mark-making recall certain tendencies in post-photographic painting and new sincerity movements, a return to intimacy, tactility, and the everyday.

Baras’s imagery, modest houses, still bodies, animals in relaxed poses, engages with the idea of stillness as resistance. In an art world dominated by irony, noise, and political spectacle, he cultivates a mode of attention that is profoundly humanistic. His light, almost evaporated surfaces create spaces of contemplation where memory and place coexist without hierarchy.

While many contemporary painters exploit materiality to the point of excess, Baras’s practice is defined by subtraction, the decision to let air, silence, and the paper’s own breath participate in the work. In this sense, he can be seen as part of a broader tendency among contemporary European artists to revisit the aesthetics of slowness, aligning his sensibility with figures such as Peter Doig, Giorgio Griffa, or even contemporary Japanese artists who privilege atmosphere and nuance over assertion.
Ultimately, Spiros Baras represents a countercurrent to contemporary visual culture. His drawings are not nostalgic retreats but subtle proposals for how to see again, slowly, softly, and with care.

Saki Chikaraishi Exhibition
AMORPHOUS

Photo by Yuji Imamura
Image provided　by Sokyo Gallery

23 Dec.Tue.2025 – 30 Jan.Feb.2026

Arashi Tanaka Exhibition
「Mimesis」

10 Jan.Sat. – 3 Feb. Tue. 2026

Mitsuhiro Ikeda Exhibition
「afterimage / ghost」

16 Jan.Fri. – 17 Feb. Tue. 2026

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver
-Weight-

10 Jan.Sat. – 29 Mar.Sun. 2026
13:00 － 18:00
Open only on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays

My weight can sit on the sofa.” （Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver）

This exhibition will feature 10 to 15 works by Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, with a focus on "Weight," one of his representative works. His large-scale solo exhibition "Breath Amorphous" was held in 2022 at BankART KAIKO + BankART Station (Yokohama), which is still fresh in our memories, but this exhibition will be his first solo exhibition in the Kansai area since the "EX-SIGN" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga (now the Shiga Prefectural Museum of Art) in 2010. Please come and see it.

According to the artist himself, the title of the work, "Weight," is as follows:

‘Weight (Human Ball)’ (stainless-steel ball) has the same weight as the artist’s body. There are nine versions of the work based on the same concept (1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1990). (In 2022, ‘2022 version’ was produced with marble under the same concept.)

[Below is the author's biography generated by AI/ChatGPT-4 in December 2025 (unedited)]

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver is a unique artist among postwar Japanese avant-garde artists. His work, while shifting in form, location, and media over the years, continues to explore fundamental questions about self and existence. While highly experimental and conceptual, his work incorporates performance and physicality, creating a strong connection with the audience. His works have been collected by museums both in Japan and abroad, and in recent years, they have been gaining recognition and re-evaluation. The 2022 "Breath Amorphous" exhibition is a prime example. He continues to garner attention both in Japan and abroad.

*Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver was born in 1947 in Hashimoto, Seta-cho, Kurita-gun, Shiga Prefecture (now Seta, Otsu City). His real name was Shuzo Azuchi. He had a strong interest in art from a young age, and while attending Shiga Prefectural Zeze High School, he began creating works incorporating happening-like actions (e.g., "Grassfield" in 1964). His artistic practice included an early dialogue with Western avant-garde and conceptual art, including an interest in philosophical and theoretical thought and the influence of Marcel Duchamp.
* In 1967, he moved to Tokyo and developed happening projects, including experimental films and street/public space actions and performances. He joined the Kansai avant-garde art collective THE PLAY and began interacting with domestic and international avant-garde movements, including Fluxus.
* In 1973, he began the "BODY (Body Contract) Series." This project involved dividing his own body into 80 parts, each of which was to be kept by 80 contracted individuals after his death. This is a representative body of work that addresses questions of life, death, self, and existence.
* Since the 1980s, he has continued to create endurance performances (e.g., "De-Story," a performance in which he spent a certain amount of time inside a rectangular parallelepiped structure) and works that address the body, space, and structure. * Since the 1990s, he has exhibited more and more in Europe, focusing on themes such as symbols, language, measurement, and memory, using the symbolism of DNA bases (A, T, C, G).

He employs a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance. He is based in Tokyo and Europe, and is active both domestically and internationally.

He continues to create art, exploring themes such as "existence," "self," "signs," "form," and "biological foundations.