From August 26 (Tue) to December 7 (Sun) 2025, Shiseido Gallery will present “Akiko and Masako Takada: Perspectives: The World As Seen By.”
Akiko and Masako Takada are identical twins who collaborate as an artist unit, using familiar materials to produce works on the theme of scale, both spatial and temporal. Products of delicate handiwork and meticulous composition, backed by mathematical or physics-based ideas, their works are the expression of a unique sensibility that fuses art and science. The Takadas are also known for researching the location where their work will be displayed and assembling exhibits that utilize the characteristics they uncover.
In 2024 the sisters visited two of Shiseido’s cultural institutions, the Shiseido Corporate Museum, and Shiseido Art House (both in Kakegawa, Shizuoka). There they encountered the passage from the I Ching (Yijing – Book of Changes) to which Shiseido owes its name, meaning “How wonderful is the virtue of the earth, from which all things are born (banbutsu shisei)” This resonates with their own view of nature, and so in this exhibition, taking the idea of banbutsu shisei as their departure point, they will depict life, its origins and evolution as layers of time, in an attempt to give visual expression, macro- and microscopically, alongside scale, to time and space linked to the cosmos through the laws of nature.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Strata, a new work in which books are stacked up in the manner of geological strata. Inspired by the likening of such layers in the earth to history books inscribed with information on the ecologies of living things and the natural environment, the pair will arrange around 500 books—and between them minerals, fossils and other items—on a bookcase extending from the floor of the smaller room at Shiseido Gallery to under the landing, to represent the chain of time and knowledge from the birth of life, to the Anthropocene era. Another new work, Timepiece, is composed of sand spilling from a broken hourglass, with stones and rocks, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the concept of time while simultaneously evoking the continuous chain of life through the ages, or alternatively, the end of life as we know it. In total the exhibition will consist of around 20 works in a mix of new, plus earlier offerings reconfigured, such as Can’t see the forest for the leaves, which employs the fractal forms widely found in nature in an allusion to the “individual” and “whole” in natural law; and Spectrum, which takes as its theme light as the source of all life.
For this exhibition Akiko and Masako Takada have organized a number of ideas running through their works to date, and taken their research to a deeper level, with the intention of developing their practice in new ways. Turning their gaze from the birth of the universe to the evolution of life over time, the trajectory and accumulation of human endeavor, and the complementary relationship of individual and whole, they offer a fresh view of this world with all its diverse entities. We are confident this exhibition will offer viewers various perspectives from which to find hope that transcends the pessimistic foretold future, and encourage them to contemplate symbiotic coexistence and sustainability as they relate to all of humanity, and include the natural world.