Past Exhibition

Since 1919, the Shiseido Gallery has been offering exquisite, memorable encounters and experiences through art in accordance with its mission to “discover and create new beauty.”

Today’s world is in a state of constant flux and instability, with consequences not only for people’s values and lifestyles, but also the environment around art and culture. At Shiseido we continue to respond flexibly to new realities as we examine the role of art in shaping a new kind of future.

The “shiseido art egg” open-call program was launched in 2006 to support the discovery and creation of new beauty by dynamic emerging artists. The selected artists are given the opportunity to organize exhibitions of their work in collaboration with curators, similar to the regular exhibitions held at the Shiseido Gallery.
This 16th shiseido art egg program received 260 applications from all over Japan. From a large number of creative proposals taking advantage of the gallery's distinctive spaces, artists Tomomi Oka, Yu Sora, and Soma Sato were selected for their unique perspectives and expression of new values and aesthetics in today's world.

Solo shows by each of the artists selected will be staged over the period from January 24 (Tue) to May 21 (Sun), 2023. Born out of frank engagement with the struggles and uncertainties of the age, their works will draw viewers’ attention to new concepts and ideas. Our hope is that the shiseido art egg exhibitions will help to bring about a better society for all.

This year's jury for the shiseido art egg prize* consist of three prominent figures on today’s scene for creative professionals: artist Hirofumi Isoya, novelist Wen Yuju, and Ayako Suwa, artist and head of conceptual food art provider Food Creation.

*The shiseido art egg prize is conferred on an artwork from among the exhibitions of the three selected artists that takes a particularly bold approach to the spaces of the Shiseido Gallery, and gives the greatest sense of creating new value. The winner will be announced on the Shiseido Gallery website sometime after or around June 2023.

Shiseido’s corporate mission is to provide “BEAUTY INNOVATIONS FOR A BETTER WORLD.” This mission is governed by the idea that encounters with and experiences of beauty through art may help guide the way we live and our manner of thinking in an increasingly uncertain world and, even if only a small part of everyday life, lead to innovations that change our actions, in turn making the world a better and more beautiful place.

Tomomi Oka makes devices in which she encloses minor, often overlooked stories, such as people’s precious personal recollections, and disappearing customs, taking memories and establishing them in the space. For this exhibition, informed by the experience of her grandfather's funeral she focuses on the Buddhist custom of sakasagoto (upside-down things), in which various everyday actions are performed in reverse upon a person’s death. Through her installation, Oka will unpack customs still observed in various parts of Japan, and take a fresh look at the country’s increasingly ossified funerary rites, and its ways of engaging with death.

I am very honored to have been selected for the shiseido art egg. The ongoing pandemic has forced me to slow down the pace of my production and its presentation. However, this work was a turning point in the direction of my own art creation, and I might even say, I was lucky to have time to think carefully about the present. I am looking forward to assembling my work in response to the beautiful setting of the Shiseido Gallery, as a release from the more subdued mood of recent times.

Yu Sora combines black embroidery on white fabric, and life-size three-dimensional renditions of items such as furniture and curtains, in installations that engage with the nondescript minutiae of everyday living. Pandemic, war, and natural disasters have shown the mundane daily routine to be a fleeting thing, easily destroyed. For this exhibition Sora will create in the gallery space a room as a setting for everyday living. Viewers will undoubtably superimpose their own “ordinary” on this setting and look back on their own memories, with a renewed appreciation of its preciousness.

It is an honor to have the opportunity to exhibit in such a splendid location. Our everyday existence can be a fragile thing, vulnerable to collapse at any time. I make works out of a desire to portray the quotidian in a way that encourages people to note the precious nature of their day-to-day existence, and gain a sense of security. I believe it is precisely the current changes in the outward everyday appearance of the world, and in people’s feelings, prompted by ongoing uncertainty around coronavirus, war and other kinds of upheaval, that make my versions of the everyday relatable. Like them or loathe them, these changes have been dubbed the “new normal” and one day soon, will just be “normal.” I look forward to us finding empathy with each other around the everyday.

Taking as his theme the question of body and mind in time and space, Soma Sato contemplates the memories and customs behind representation, using duplicating technologies to incorporate archived material in his practice, in order to express the temporal flow of objects and spaces, and the relationships between them. At this exhibition Sato will explore the temporal and spatial mismatch and intersection of science and faith, and the state of our souls, primarily through a new work that uses 3D scanning to duplicate and assemble a giant cedar worshiped for centuries at the Shinmei Shrine in Gifu that was toppled by torrential rain back in 2020.

In this unique exhibition space that has served as a vital host to art and culture in Japan for many decades, I am very much looking forward to how I react and what emerges, and also, how visitors take that on board in sensory terms. From the beginning of the production process until the end of the exhibition, and including the traces of it all, I do hope that these transient things do not stay within the limits of what I imagine them to be, but are freed from them. I hope there is something unknown here that will touch you somehow. Last but not least, allow me to express my sincere gratitude for this opportunity