[Exhibition Outline]
Towa Takaya Solo Exhibition ‘Being and Transfiguration beyond nothingness’
Dates ｜7 Jun (Sat) - 29 Jun (Sun), 2025
Closed｜Mon. Closed Tuesdays
Venue ｜ASTER Curator Museum
Hours ｜11:00 - 18:00
Location ｜1-99 Toiyacho, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920-0061, Japan
Admission ｜ ¥500 (incl. tax) ** Free for students
Special page for individual exhibitions:READ MORE

*This exhibition will be held concurrently with the exhibition “Gutai Abstraction”, curated by Hiroki Yamamoto.

Until now, I have kept the meditative and phenomenal experience of swaying and immersion in my work, and through WHYNOT's activities I started to visit the city of Suzu in Ishikawa Prefecture, following an exhibition with the Suzu pottery artists. The concept of nature (jinen), which had been vague to me, became more physically aware and recognisable through my encounters with Pearl Island. At the same time as feeling a sense of awe towards nature, I also re-recognised the smallness of my own self as a living, breathing being.
I tried to capture the overwhelming energy of the earth in my work. In my recent works, which are painted with my fingers using the sand and soil of Suzu as pigments, the distance between the “act” of painting and the “earth” grows closer.
I hope you will take this opportunity to see the expression of the pictorial space that has developed through my involvement with Suzu.

<On the solo exhibition: Being and transfiguration beyond nothingness>

We do not know when and where ‘it’ or ‘I’ is born.
Creation as an experience of consciousness and perception, and the transformation of matter experienced through the self-production of pigments, is an act of examining the relationship between human existence and things, accompanied by physical awareness. In the resulting flat space, a more intrinsic and universal perception of the world develops, which would be impossible to represent in language. There is a sense of something infinitely expansive, or, on the other hand, of simply standing in front of silence and nothingness.
My perception of “now, this life”, which I sensed when I set foot on the land of Suzu, became more fluid with the transformation of materials in the course of creation. This led to a transformation of my perception of time and space, as if the ephemeral and the eternal were multilayered and reversible.
I would be happy if these experiences, crystallised in the form of artworks, could be viewed as an exhibition and, as “themselves”, could be newly or come to life again.

Towa Takaya
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Concurrent exhibition curated by Hiroki Yamamoto
‘Guchusho - neither concrete nor abstract, or concrete and abstract’
Dates ｜12 Apr (Sat) - 27 Jul (Sun), 2025
Closed Mon. Closed Tuesdays
Venue ｜ASTER Curator Museum
Hours ｜11:00 - 18:00
Location ｜1-99 Toiyacho, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920-0061, Japan
Museum official website: https://aster-g.com/

Towa Takaya was born in Japan and studied art at university in London, UK. Having received an art education in Europe, which emphasises social context and the multi-layered nature of concepts, Takaya is highly aware of the political nature of her work. In addition, she is an avid adopter of new technologies. At the same time, it is interesting to note her deep interest in universal entities and traditional techniques. Takaya's diverse activities include the Blue Series (2017-), which is the result of her spiritual search for the meaning of death and life, but her paintings, which never remain in one place but continue to move, are a mixture of contradictory abstraction and figuration.

Hiroki Yamamoto (Cultural researcher)

* To read his review of Takaya's solo exhibition “Being and transfiguration beyong nothingness ”, Please click here.