Collection Exhibition 2: The Possibilities of the Written Word ｜21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Information

Period:

2025.9.27 (Sat.) - 2026.1.18 (Sun.)

Venue:

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Gallery 1-6

Admission:

Adults: ¥450 (¥360)
University students: ¥310 (¥240)
Students: Free
65 and over: ¥360
*Fees in parentheses are for groups of 20 people or more and web tickets

Book tickets here

Closed:

Mondays (except October 13, October 27, November 3, November 24, January 12), October 14, October 28, November 4, November 25, December 30 – January 1, January 13

Kanazawa Citizens Free Viewing Days: On the dates below, citizens of Kanazawa can view Collection Exhibition 2: The Possibilities of the Written Word for free. (Proof of residency required)

- Promote the Arts Day: the second Saturday of each month during the exhibition (October 11, November 8, December 13, January 10)

- Kanazawa Citizens Free Art Day “Open Museum 2025”: November 3

For More Information:

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This exhibition presents works from the museum’s collection with the theme of the written word in contemporary art.
Our daily lives are saturated with text. The words you are reading now are written in characters, and we encounter them constantly in emails, social media, books, signs, posters, and video subtitles. Although text, as a means of communication, has become an inseparable part of everyday life, we rarely stop to recognize its existence or think about its design and functions.
In art, as in daily life, text is often used to convey information or messages: it can bring out new meanings, spark deeper thought, and expand the imagination. At the same time, there are limits to what text can do, and its presence can actually disrupt meaning or prevent superficial interpretation.
Some works draw attention to the acts that surround the written word—writing and reading it—revealing their physical dimension. Focusing on this physicality offers an important perspective in today’s world, where interacting with text through digital devices has become routine.
The works in this exhibition span painting, printmaking, posters, calligraphy, ceramics, video, and installation, and nearly all of them incorporate text. Why does a work make use of text? Why was a particular piece of text chosen? Why is it presented in this form? What effects arise from its presence? Looking at the works from these perspectives opens up new possibilities for interpretation. At the same time, exploring the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa with text as a lens offers a chance to reflect on our own relationship with written language in the age of social media. We invite you to discover the richness and depth of expression that the written word can bring to art.

Exhibiting artists (in alphabetical order)

Cécile ANDRIEU
AWAZU Kiyoshi
Marcel BROODTHAERS
Gimhongsok
Shilpa GUPTA
INOUE Yuichi
IZUMI Taro
KAKINUMA Koji
KITADE Fujio
Joseph KOSUTH
NAKAMURA Kimpei
QIU Zhijie
SAITO Makoto
SHIOMI Mieko
Rupert SPIRA
YOKOO Tadanori

Exhibition Structure

AWAZU Kiyoshi, Watching, c.1996-c. 2000
H165 × W133.5cm Mixed media on canvas
photo: KIOKU Keizo © AWAZU Yaeko
*Title estimated by the museum based on its research.

Enchanted by the Written Word
Gallery 1

Exhibiting artist:
AWAZU Kiyoshi (b. 1929 in Tokyo, d. 2009 in Kanagawa)

Works by Awazu Kiyoshi, a leading figure in postwar Japanese graphic design, make up more than half of the museum’s collection. Awazu was fascinated by the beauty of letters and type, exploring them in diverse ways. Around 2000 he became engrossed in copying ancient Chinese pictographs, finding in their forms, which emerged from images and symbols, design qualities that connect to contemporary art and design. We invite viewers to experience imagery that emerges directly from the characters themselves.
IZUMI Taro, Old Name, or: Sorry, It’s Already Taken, 2018
Dimensions variable
Six-channel video
photo: OMOTE Nobutada
© IZUMI Taro

Rhythms of the Written Word
Gallery 2

Exhibiting artists:
INOUE Yuichi (b. 1916 in Tokyo, d. 1985 in Kanagawa)
IZUMI Taro (b. 1976 in Nara, lives and works in Tokyo)
KITADE Fujio (b. 1919 in Hyogo, d. 2014 in Ishikawa)
NAKAMURA Kimpei (b. 1935 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, lives and works in Tokyo)
SAITO Makoto (b. 1952 in Fukuoka, lives and works in Tokyo)

The brushstrokes and design of text, together with its meaning, can evoke tactile sensations in viewers. In Inoue Yuichi’s calligraphy Kaze (Wind), one feels as if a gust of wind is passing through the space, even indoors. By contrast, in the video work Old Name, or: Sorry, It’s Already Taken, Izumi Taro placed live eels in iron containers shaped like letters of the alphabet; their writhing movements, paired with the words “so mean” which they spell out, may provoke a sense of unease. Running text, drifting text, shifting text—what rhythms can we perceive in these works’ diverse treatments of the written word?
YOKOO Tadanori,
What’s yours is mine. What’s mine is mine., 2009
H194 × W194cm
Oil on canvas
photo: KIOKU Keizo
© YOKOO Tadanori

The Written Word in Flux
Gallery 3

Exhibiting artist:
YOKOO Tadanori (b. 1936 in Hyogo, lives and works in Tokyo)

What’s yours is mine. What’s mine is mine. was created by Yokoo Tadanori during his 2009 solo exhibition at the museum, produced live before an audience and inspired by Leandro Erlich’s permanent installation The Swimming Pool. The English words of the title appear reversed, as if mirrored on the water’s surface. This illusion conjures the sense of a tangible image for words that in reality have no physical substance. The work encourages us to envision a world that wavers between presence and absence, reality and illusion, and to reflect on the meaning conveyed by the text appearing within it.
Cécile ANDRIEU, Hours, 1990
Dimensions variable
Six books, white correction fluid, paper, six wall clocks
photo: KIOKU Keizo
© Cécile ANDRIEU

Invitation to Imagination
Gallery 4

Exhibiting artists:
Cécile ANDRIEU (b. 1956 in Ardennes, France, lives and works in Kanazawa, Ishikawa)
Marcel BROODTHAERS (b. 1924 in Saint-Gilles, Belgium, d. 1976 in Cologne, Germany)
Gimhongsok (b. 1964 in Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul)
Joseph KOSUTH (b. 1945 in Toledo, USA, lives and works in New York and Venice, Italy)
SHIOMI Mieko (b. 1938 in Okayama, lives and works in Osaka)
Rupert SPIRA (b. 1960 in London, UK, lives and works in Oxford)

Text moves between interpretable and uninterpretable states. Marcel Broodthaers’s Museum-Museum and Gimhongsok’s Public Blank (Kanazawa Version) channel pointed critique through humor and the act of reading. Other works make meaning difficult to grasp at first sight, or render text physically unreadable. Cécile Andrieu’s Hours, developed from reading six books at set times each day, as in the Christian practice of the canonical hours, and then covering the passages with correction fluid, and Rupert Spira’s Poem Bowl, densely inscribed with the artist’s own poetry, register traces of the body in the act of reading and writing and prompt us to reconsider how we engage with text. We invite you to take your time with the written word, reflect on it, and immerse yourself in thought and imagination.
QIU Zhijie,
One Word One Stone － Success or Failure, 2018
Dimensions variable
Ink, stone
photo: KIOKU Keizo
©︎ QIU Zhijie

Evolving Space
Gallery 5 and Corridor

Exhibiting artists:
QIU Zhijie (b. 1969 in Fujian Province, China, lives and works in Beijing)
Shilpa GUPTA (b. 1976 in Mumbai, India, lives and works in Mumbai)

The phrase “one word, one stone” refers to the Buddhist practice of transcribing sutras by carving a single character onto each of a number of stones. Qiu Zhijie’s One Word One Stone － Success or Failure reinterprets this idea by engraving one to four characters at a time from Liang Qichao’s essay “On Success and Failure” in his text “Freedom” onto stones. Liang (1873–1929), who fled to Japan after the failed reform movement in the late Qing dynasty and carried out a campaign of public commentary, expressed in this essay his resolve in the face of challenges. Broken into fragments of one to four characters and recombined, the words take on meanings that depart from their original context and resonate throughout the space.

Shilpa Gupta, who grew up witnessing the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, presents a work consisting of tape inscribed with the phrase “There is No Border Here.” While tape can form a boundary line simply by being placed on the ground, this work uses it to weave a narrative evoking a world beyond the divisions that separate us.
KAKINUMA Koji, Phoenix, 2013
H750 × W1100cm
Black ink made from burnt pine on drawing paper
photo: NOSE Shoichi
© KAKINUMA Koji

How We Live
Gallery 6

Exhibiting artists:
KAKINUMA Koji (b. 1970 in Tochigi, lives and works in Tokyo)
AWAZU Kiyoshi

Kakinuma Koji’s calligraphy, into which he poured every ounce of energy and spirit, embodies the eternal presence of the phoenix in a single, unrepeatable moment. The phoenix, dying only to be reborn in flames, emerges at overwhelming scale through calligraphic art pushed to its very limits.
Facing this work is a group of pieces by Awazu Kiyoshi that incorporate the letter “E.” This character is associated with words such as Earth, Environment, Energy, and End. Together with H2O Earthman, a figure Awazu conceived as a child of the 21st century, the works are presented as slogans for navigating the present age.
The Eternal phoenix soars through the sky, while finite human beings, though sometimes swept along by fate, continue to walk firmly upon the Earth. From the handling of text in each work emerges a philosophy of how we might live.