Past Exhibition

For nearly a century since its 1919 opening, the Shiseido Gallery has been promoting Shiseido’s corporate ideal of “discovering and creating new value.” In 2006, the Gallery began the”shiseido art egg,” a public exhibition program designed to support promising new artists. Each year the selected artists are offered opportunities to show their work at the Shiseido Gallery. As with any Shiseido Gallery showing, these exhibitions are planned and executed in collaboration with a professional curator and various specialists of the Shiseido Gallery staff.

This year’s 12th shiseido art egg collected applications from 350 potential participants from all around Japan, roughly 70% of whom are in their twenties or thirties. Among the many who proposed very creative plans to take advantage of the Shiseido Gallery’s distinctive exhibition space, artists Yuma Tomiyasu, Koichi Sato, and Hanae Utamura were eventually selected for their rich artistic sensibilities and unique perspectives. These three will present their works at the Shiseido Gallery in succession during the period from June 8 (Friday) to August 26 (Sunday). We invite one and all to visit the Shiseido Gallery to discover what these next-generation artists are bringing to the table.

Toshiharu Ito: Professor of Tokyo University of the Arts and Shiseido Gallery Advisor
Yuri Mitsuda: Art Critic and Shiseido Gallery Advisor
Shiseido Corporate Culture Department

After all three solo exhibitions have finished, a three-member judging panel will select one of the exhibiting artists to receive the "shiseido art egg prize." This year’s panel will include artist Manika Nagare, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, and publisher Yoshiyuki Morioka.
The winner will be announced in mid-September 2018 on the Shiseido Gallery website, and there will be an award ceremony open to members of the public interested in the activities of these new artists.

June 8 (Fri) ～ July 1 (Sun) , 2018 (21 days)

Yuma Tomiyasu is interested in those narrow interstices between reality and non-reality occurring in our daily lives. Her work considers these—and attempts to have viewers experience them artificially—by considering the kinds of perceptions and sensibilities deeply layered into human psychology or otherwise invisible, and thus not entirely scientifically explainable. Tomiyasu’s exhibitions take the form of large installations comprised of numerous rooms. Viewers stepping into these may just happen to encounter certain aspects of their own inner unconscious worlds.

July 6 (Fri) ～ July 29 (Sun), 2018 (21 days)

Influenced by his interest in fields like anthropology and botany, Koichi Sato avoids dualist thinking to examine the multiformed/dynamically fluid actualities of life as it freely crosses various boundaries. Taking video and sound as his primary media, most recently he has been exploring the relationships between plants and human beings, producing series of works around keywords like “gender” and “post-human.” This exhibition takes the form of an installation that utilizes video, sound, sculpture, scents, and other techniques to explore themes like plant reproduction, landscape gardening, and interpersonal exchanges.

August 3 (Fri) ～August 26 (Sun), 2018 (21 days)

Hanae Utamura takes up perspectives including nationality, race and differing social positioning, using video, performance and installation techniques to create spaces where self and other may come face to face. For this exhibition she will present an installation with a heavy emphasis on bodily physicality. By considering how the experience of the performance will unfold within the exhibition, Utamura makes the audience itself a participant in the performance, thereby exploring the possibilities for performance as a form of exhibition work.

Photo by Ken KATO