Collection Exhibition: Walking, Staying｜21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Collection Exhibition: Walking, Staying

2026.5.23(Sat.) - 2026.10.18(Sun.)

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Information

Period:

2026.5.23(Sat.) - 2026.10.18(Sun.)

Venue:

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Gallery 1-6,13

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

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Closed:

Mondays (open on July 20, September 21, October 12), July 21, September 24, October 13

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For many artists, the creative process begins with the act of observing the outside world. Works that depict the scenery of unfamiliar places or shed new light on familiar landscapes have always served to spark our curiosity. So what becomes visible when we turn our attention to the act of walking itself? Activities such as walking, mountaineering, and pilgrimages can become physical processes that encourage free thought and bring us closer to the sublime, instead of just being a means of getting from one place to another. Not everyone is able to freely walk anywhere and any distance they please, however. The question of where a given person can walk and stay are dependent on the physical condition of that person: it entails a political dimension defined by the society in which that person is situated. The act of walking has also been used as a means of resistance or protest against such circumstances. This act of walking, with its multilayered meanings and functions, can be found in various forms within works of art.
In this exhibition, we present works from our collection through the lens of the acts of “walking” or “staying.” The exhibited works depict various forms of walking, ranging from the physical act of taking that first step out to observe the outside world, delving into one’s own thoughts and memories, and negotiating the various kinds of friction and relationships that arise in the places where the walker is situated. In this context, walking and staying are not to be understood as opposites. Since the act of stopping is inherent to walking, and since the act of settling can be viewed as a kind of temporary pause over a long timeline, these actions can be understood in terms of a continuous movement characterized by different speeds and rhythms.
Through these practices, which connect the simple acts of walking and staying to a diverse range of attitudes such as observation, resistance, and reflections on memory and time, the exhibition highlights the various relationships that unfold between people, spaces, and society.

Exhibiting artists
(in alphabetical order)

AOKI Chie, CHEN Shaoxiong, FUJIOKA Aya (Phase1), KASAHARA Emiko (guest artist), MURAKAMI Satoshi, Jun NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA, NINAGAWA Mika (Phase2), NOGUCHI Rika, SHIOTA Chiharu, Fiona TAN, YANASE Anri, YEE I-Lann

Introduction to the exhibiting artists

NOGUCHI Rika, A Prime #12, 1999
© NOGUCHI Rika

NOGUCHI Rika
Galleries 1 & 2

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1971. Began creating photographic works in 1992 and graduated from the Department of Photography at the Nihon University College of Art in 1994. Currently based in Tokyo.
Mountaineering is perhaps the activity where the act of walking finds meaning not merely as a means of reaching a destination, but rather in the physical experience and process itself. Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak, has long been known as a sacred mountain, and walking there has historically been both a pilgrimage and a form of tourism. Noguchi Rika’s ongoing series “A Prime,” which she has been working on since 1997, does not depict the iconic silhouette of Mount Fuji with its ridgelines, but rather the desolate, bare earth, a sea of clouds, and human figures that are as small as dots. Each of them carries the solitude of their journey on their backs. Noguchi explains that this series contains works about prime numbers, which cannot be further decomposed, and “our primitive landscape, or a perspective as seen by being arriving from outer space.” By walking the land herself, feeling the rough texture of the rocks beneath her feet and sensing the faint glow within the mist that seems to lead to another world, Noguchi seems to be attempting to capture the “most fundamental” landscape that lies beneath the symbolic Mount Fuji.
FUJIOKA Aya, The Castle, 2014
© FUJIOKA Aya

FUJIOKA Aya
Gallery 2

Phase 1: May 23 (Sat.) – August 2 (Sun.), 2026

Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1972. Graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art in 1994. After traveling to Taiwan and Europe, she started living in New York from 2007 onwards. Since returning to Japan in 2012, she has been based in Hiroshima and Kyoto.
“The Castle” is a photographic series that Fujioka Aya has been shooting for over 20 years, set in her hometown of Kure City, Hiroshima Prefecture. In these ever-changing landscapes, one can trace the path she took as she walked through her hometown, varying the season and time of day in order to capture these images of the building with the orange roof standing atop the hill. According to Fujioka, this “castle,” visible from anywhere in the town, is actually a nursing home that, for the local community, carries the meaning of a place to entrust the final stage of one’s life. For the artist, who has lived abroad for many years, this “castle” — constantly visible yet distant, and a place she hopes to one day call home — is superimposed onto her hometown as an inexhaustible subject.
NINAGAWA Mika, The days were beautiful, 2017
© mika ninagawa, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery

NINAGAWA Mika
Gallery 2

Phase 2: August 4 (Tue.) – October 18 (Sun.), 2026

Born in Tokyo in 1972. Photographer, Film Director, Artist.
“The days were beautiful” is a series that Ninagawa Mika photographed over the year and a half leading up to the passing of her father, the theater director Ninagawa Yukio. These images of nature and people living in the city that Ninagawa captured in the gaps between time spent caring for her family (both nursing and childcare) and on her work, are rendered with dazzling beauty. Faced with a premonition of death, her gaze, which carefully observes each scene, seems to overlap with her father’s as it turns toward the stage, ultimately suggesting a kind of connection to the next life. This collection of works captures, within the scope of daily life, the truth that even the special time spent confronting the death of a family member is part and parcel of the ceaselessly changing fabric of life. It expresses the radiance of life in a form distinct from the vividly colored artificiality and ostentatiousness that have become synonymous with Ninagawa’s name.
AOKI Chie, BODY 21-2, 2021
© AOKI Chie
photo: Keizo KIOKU

AOKI Chie
Gallery 2

Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1981. She studied lacquer art in the Department of Crafts at Kanazawa College of Art. She is currently based in Kanazawa.
In her “BODY” series, Aoki expresses the forces at work within the body through the complex textures found in lacquer, a material that transforms from a soft liquid into a hard shell. In contrast to the upper body, which possesses an abstract, molten-like quality, the toes are rendered realistically, down to the orientation and angle of each individual digit. The interplay of forces at work within the body and the delicate relationship between tension and relaxation are realized through a form where this abstract shape and meticulous depiction gently merge with each other. In this work, the figure adopts a relaxed posture, as if it were closing in on itself to protect itself from the outside world while surrendering to gravity. By engaging with lacquer, a material that combines softness and hardness, transparency and opacity, Aoki seeks to capture the complex forces at work within the body.
CHEN Shaoxiong, Ink Media, 2013
© Luo Qingmin, Estate of Chen Shaoxiong

CHEN Shaoxiong
Gallery 3

Born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China in 1962. Graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1984. Active in several artist collectives, including the conceptual art group Big Tail Elephant and Xijing Men. Passed away in Beijing in 2016.
Ink Media is a work that depicts scenes of protests that have taken place around the world as ink paintings that were based on images found on the internet, which Chen then animated. The underlying context behind this work involves a situation where, since the advent of social media, dramatic images have been rapidly captured and re-edited to create a reality that seems close to the viewer, regardless of actual distance. Particularly in China, where the state enforces strict controls over the circulation of information, this work, created using traditional ink and Western academic drawing techniques, addresses not only how protest becomes an act of expression, but also the nature of the media that conveys that information. In other words, the scope of Chen’s work extends to the point where, thanks to how the museum collects and preserves these works and materials, the documentation of “naked street politics” acquires historical and aesthetic value over time.
YANASE Anri,
Kein Licht. － From the place where I am standing now, 2016-2017
© YANASE Anri

YANASE Anri
In front of Gallery 4

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1993. Graduated from the Photography Program at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Faculty of Art and Design at Kyoto University of Art and Design (now Kyoto University of the Arts) in 2016.
Yanase Anri has been using video to record her own specific actions performed in public spaces, in addition to capturing the reactions of bystanders. In this work, Kein Licht. – From the place where I am standing now, Yanase walks along the fence of the helipad construction site in Takae, Okinawa as she recites a text aloud. Eventually, protesters and riot police appear, calling out warnings as they begin to follow her, but Yanase does not stop either reciting the text or walking. The text that Yanase is reading is Elfriede JELINEK’s play Kein Licht. Written in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear disaster, this play frequently uses the subject “we,” while voices that never quite coalesce into actual dialogue accumulate, expressing the sense of chaos that accompanies a state of emergency. Who does the “we” uttered along the length of this fence in Okinawa refer to? Through Yanase’s act of walking along this boundary line drawn in space, voices from different standpoints resonate successively without intersecting with each other, highlighting the silence that exists within.
MURAKAMI Satoshi, Living Migration in Noto, 2020
Collection of the artist
photo: Keizo KIOKU

MURAKAMI Satoshi
Gallery 4

Born in Tokyo in 1988. Graduated from the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Musashino Art University in 2011. Currently based in Nagano Prefecture, Chiba Prefecture and Tokyo.
Murakami Satoshi decided to “create his own way of living” after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which struck just as he was graduating from university with a degree in architecture, forcing him to confront the fragility of society’s infrastructure. First, using several houses in his neighborhood as models, he drew a house for himself. Based on this drawing, he built a house out of Styrofoam just large enough for him to lie down in, and then started living his life while carrying it on his back. Titled Living Migration, Murakami carried out this project intermittently across the country over a seven-year period until 2021, making use of three successive houses. His daily drawings and diary entries document the entire process of his repeated temporary “residences,” which were negotiated with landowners at each location he visited. The museum collection includes the house where Murakami lived from 2015 to 2018, photographs of the places where he stayed, video recordings of the negotiations, and 179 drawings created during that period. In addition to these works, this exhibition also showcases drawings and records from a 2020 walk that the artist did from Kanazawa to the Noto Peninsula. Living Migration represents a fundamental reexamination of the ways of living we take for granted that involve the ownership of land and houses and the acts of leaving home to go out before returning to the same house.
Jun NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex – For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards, 2001
© JUN NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA, Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo / the artist Commissioned by Yokohama Triennale 2001

Jun NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA
Gallery 13

Born in Tokyo in 1968. The son of a Japanese mother and a Vietnamese father, he graduated from an art college in the United States and has been based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam since 1997. He currently divides his time between Ho Chi Minh City and Houston, United States.
Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex — For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards is the first video work in Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project,” created through underwater filming. Against the backdrop of a beautiful seabed, the film depicts young people struggling against the water pressure and currents as they attempt to pull cyclos (cycle rickshaws) across it. The cyclo, which served as the primary mode of transportation for ordinary people in 20th-century Vietnam, also functions as a motif for Nguyen-Hatsushiba that symbolizes how workers are buffeted by rapid social change. After the Vietnam War, the cyclo became a means for the unemployed, including former soldiers, to make a living with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Following the introduction of a market economy in 1986, however, the spread of motorcycles and cars caused them to lose their place on the streets. The drivers, who had been slowly propelling their cyclos forward while coming up to the surface multiple times to breathe, eventually let go of them and left, revealing mosquito nets resembling coffins that sank down to the seabed. The act of pedaling a cyclo on the seabed off Nha Trang, where many “boat people” risked their lives attempting to flee the country after the war, represents a kind of memorial to those who tried to cross the sea, those who remained in the country, and every individual who struggled to survive while being tossed about by the great tides of politics and the economy.
YEE I-Lann, The Orang Besar Series – Kain Panjang with Petulant Kepala, 2010
© Yee I-Lann
photo: Keizo KIOKU

YEE I-Lann
Gallery 13

Born in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia in 1971. The daughter of a New Zealand mother and a Sino-Kadazan father (of mixed indigenous Kadazan and Chinese descent), she was educated in Australia. She is currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Drawing on her hybrid roots, Yee I-Lann has created works that critically engage with the history, politics, and economy of Southeast Asia. Her “Orang Besar” series consists of textile works that combine the traditional Javanese wax-resist dyeing technique known as batik with digital photographic printing technology. Since the Federation of Malaya declared independence in 1957, batik has been institutionally promoted to shape the identity of this multiethnic nation and has become the national costume. In the formal attire known as kain panjang, the symbolic patterns depicted on the “kepala” — the part that faces outward when worn — indicate one’s rank and social significance. “Orang Besar” (literally “big man”) is a term used to refer to individuals in Southeast Asia who hold economic and political influence, serving as mediating figures between the ruling and working classes. Motifs such as the “parasitic” banyan trees, the “petulant” mimosa, and the “carnivorous” pitcher plant are depicted on yellow fabric symbolizing the sultan, offering a kind of metaphorical representation of those within the power structure. Through the medium of “traditional” batik, Yee depicts the layered narratives of domination found all across the islands of Southeast Asia.
Fiona TAN, Rise and Fall, 2009
© Fiona TAN
Courtesy: the artist, Frith Street Gallery,
London and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo

Fiona TAN
Gallery 13

Born in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in 1966, to a Chinese Indonesian father and an Australian mother, Tan was educated in Australia before moving to the Netherlands in 1988. She studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and is currently based there.
Since winning acclaim in 1997 for a documentary film that traces how her relatives became scattered across the world, Tan has explored the relationship between surviving records and personal and collective memory, primarily through the mediums of photography and video. In this work, Rise and Fall, two women from different generations appear within two similar landscapes, while their quiet everyday lives are depicted. Gestures that seem to recall and evoke memories through touch are inserted into daily routines consisting of activities like sleeping, bathing, and walking, revealing the complexity of a temporal flow where the spaces and times of these two women intersect with each other. The title “Rise and Fall” refers to movements that appear contradictory when viewed individually, but which can be interpreted in parallel with the relationship between the two video sequences in this work when understood as phenomena that occur consecutively within a single object. The complex movements of water, moreover, suggest the nature of time in memory — where past and present constantly change, swirling around and exerting an influence on each other. This work exemplifies Tan’s practice of exploring the relationship between human memory and imagery through moving images.
KASAHARA Emiko, DR 2019-, 2019-
Collection of the artist
photo: Kiyotoshi Takashima

KASAHARA Emiko (guest artist)
Gallery 5

Born in Tokyo in 1963. After completing her graduate studies at the Tama Art University Graduate School of Fine Arts, she was based in New York (United States) from 1995 to 2014. She is currently based in Tokyo.
Kasahara Emiko has presented social and political themes in her work using a minimalist visual language. This exhibition presents a project she has been pursuing for over 10 years. Kasahara visited the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), the Transcontinental Railroad (TCR), the former South Manchuria Railway (SMR), and the former German National Railway (Deutsche Reichsbahn;DR) — all of which are linked to colonialism in the modern era — where she performed actions in which trains passing over these tracks flatten various coins. Deeply intertwined with border crossings and invasions, these railways transported people and resources and supported urban development, but also led to many casualties. These coins, flattened by trains after passing through the hands of nameless people, evoke the powerlessness of the individual in the face of the immense power symbolized by the railways. On the other hand, having been deformed by acts resembling a child’s prank and stripped of their monetary value to become unique objects, they also demonstrate the potential for individual actions to bring about transformations in existing values and structures. While conducting extensive field research rooted in her interest in historical and geographical contexts, Kasahara’s critical approach lies in her ability to deploy expressions centered on the malleable power of art to offer a different perspective on existing value systems.
SHIOTA Chiharu, A Room of Memory, 2009
© SHIOTA Chiharu
photo: Sunhi MANG

SHIOTA Chiharu
Gallery 6

Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1972. She moved to Germany in 1996, studying under Marina Abramović at the Braunschweig University of Art and under Rebecca Horn at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany.
Shiota has long used objects that hold the memories of their former owners such as old clothes and keys as motifs in her work. In A Room of Memory, she focuses on memories of Berlin, the city where she is based. This work is made up of windows that were once used on the former East Berlin side of the Berlin Wall. Shiota, who saw windows as a kind of “skin that functions as an insurmountable boundary,” collected these over several years by visiting demolition sites in the area. While the Berlin Wall left behind deep scars of division in the city even after it came down, the windows removed from buildings can be likened to ephemeral fragments of skin, faintly etched with the traces of individuals who used them in their daily lives. As an accumulation of such fragments, this work resembles the structure of the Wall while remaining distinct from it: it is more akin to a layered tapestry of personal memories.