Period:
2025.2.1(Sat.) - 2025.5.11(Sun.)
Phase1: 2.1(Sat) - 3.23 (Sun) Phase2: 3.25 (Tue) - 5.11(Sun) 10:00-18:00(until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays) * Ticket sales end 30 minutes before closing
2025.2.1(Sat.) - 2025.5.11(Sun.)
Phase1: 2.1(Sat) - 3.23 (Sun) Phase2: 3.25 (Tue) - 5.11(Sun) 10:00-18:00(until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays) * Ticket sales end 30 minutes before closing
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Phase1: Gallery 1-4, Design Gallery, Long-Term Project Room
Phase2: Gallery 1-6, Design Gallery, Long-Term Project Room
Adults: ¥450 (¥360)
Students: ¥310 (¥240)
18 and under: free
65 and over: ¥360
*Fees in parentheses are for groups of 20 people or more.
Mondays (open on February 24, May 5), February 25, May 7
Number of Artists:
12
Number of works:
128 (Including works to be changed during the exhibition)
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Phone: +81-76-220-2800
E-Mail: info@kanazawa21.jp
*Rirkrit TIRAVANIJA’s work in gallery 3 is temporarily unavailable for viewing due to ongoing maintenance. We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the museum’s opening, large-scale collection exhibitions to showcase the most important function of the museum — its collection — have been held throughout the year 2024–2025. This is the third of those exhibitions marking this anniversary.
The museum’s collection activities began in 2000, before the museum opened, and based on the curators’ research and studies, the museum has been constantly adding new works to the collection every year. The collection, which had approximately 200 items by the time of the museum’s opening, has now grown to approximately 4,200 items. This collection represents both the history of the museum and its identity. The three policies governing the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa are: (1) works produced since 1980 that propose new values, (2) works influencing such new values and providing points of reference in terms of art history since 1900, and (3) works rich in new creativity closely associated with the Kanazawa area. This collection is both a mirror of the changing times and a repository of the history of artistic expression that has been accumulated and woven together. The collection exhibition is a platform for looking at the world, and to think about and discuss the past, present, and future. It offers us an opportunity to look back over the past 20 years and discuss the future.
Francesco CLEMENTE
Gimhongsok
HOMMA Takashi
Rebecca HORN
KOIE Makiko
Rafael LOZANO-HEMMER
NAKAGAWA Yukio (Phase 2)
NAKAZONO Koji
Giuseppe PENONE (Phase 2)
SUZUKI Hiraku
Rirkrit TIRAVANIJA
YASURA Takeshi (Phase 2)
Born in Michelstadt, Germany in 1944. Died in 2024.
For three years from around 1968, Rebecca Horn had to spend time recuperating from a lung problem caused by the synthetic material she used to make sculptures at art school. It was this experience of loneliness and isolation from the outside world that gave rise to her performances in the early 1970s, which involved wearing items that extended or restricted the body, including objects made of feathers, wings, and masks. This consciousness of the yearning for communication and intimacy in the form of touching and of the fragility of the human body and the need to protect it is also explored in her videos, films, and three-dimensional works. As well as installations that reflect on things like memories that have been erased from society or history and grief, in recent years Horn also presented works that use words, lighting and music created in collaboration with musicians to inquire into the spiritual realm and the cycles of nature.
Eight Branches of Hair on Fire 1993
Eight knives attached to metal rods are lined up side by side with the tips of their blades pointing upwards, with a brush positioned above each knife so that the bristles point downwards. The knives slowly move up and down in turn, creating a gentle wave motion. As a result, each knife in turn stabs the bristles of the brush above. The title hints at the fear of flickering flames approaching branches of hair. Here, the knives and brushes are robbed of their original functions and turned into abstract symbols. The hardness of the metal and the sharpness of the blades that can also be used as weapons, the hair, which is soft and also a metaphor for eternity, and the repetition, subtlety, and gentle speed of the mechanical stabbing motion all stimulate the viewers’ sensuality.
Born in Miyagi, Japan in 1978.
Suzuki Hiraku, who had been exploring expression using sound such as field recording, gradually began to create a two-dimensional work using earth and leaves as materials. Suzuki produces works in wide-ranging activities: live drawing, installation with asphalt pieces, wall painting, drawing on A4- sized xerox paper and video. His approach that is consistent at all times is to pursue his own expression of drawing or line-making at the actual scene of creation and becoming, while being closely related to familiar materials and environment.
bacteria sign (circle) 2000
The 86 square works of Suzuki’s bacteria sign (circle) are his first pieces after he switched over to visual expression. A variety of circular lines and shapes, which emerge through his excavation-like act of laying earth, burying dead leaves, and scraping their veins, show the moment and the place of becoming. Earth and leaves in these works are metaphors for civilization, history and city as well as familiar beings. These works represent the fundamental and representative approach of Suzuki’s expression of drawing, in which his body actions intervene latent distant past, memories, unknown things and even another space-time axis like future. Existing as the boundary to the new and another dimension, Suzuki’s works quietly but profoundly jar our senses.
Born in Naples, Italy in 1952.
Francesco Clemente wrote many poems as a child and taught himself to paint. In 1972, after moving to Rome, he met Alighiero BOETTI and was heavily influenced by him. He later traveled to India and Afghanistan, whose culture and thought played an important role in his subsequent artistic activities. In the 1980s Clemente was associated with the Transavantguardia (Transavantgarde), the Italian version of the Neo-expressionism movement. He has spent time in different cultural spheres producing works that rely on a range of different techniques, including miniatures, mosaics, and frescoes, while also undertaking collaborations with artists such as Allen GINSBERG, Andy WARHOL, and Jean-Michel BASQUIAT. His work is characterized by fragmented images inspired by the free interplay of memories, cultures, ages, and sexual differences arising from his own introspection and experiences.
Self-Portrait with Shoes and Glass 1979
This work is one of 18 self-portraits drawn with Chinese ink and gouache on photographybackground paper mounted on linen. On the left of the roughly five-meter long piece of paper the artist has drawn his own nude and a single glass, and on the right, a pair of shoes. The nude is deformed and fragmented. In discussing his approach to making art, the artist later commented that he seeks “to give the same weight to what’s interior and what’s exterior, and to consider the body as the line dividing the exterior from the interior.” This approach can also be seen in this work, where the artist, despite being the subject of the work, has placed himself on the same plane as the glass and the shoes, depicting his own inner world and the external environment on the same level. The work is an attempt to describe in the form of a self-portrait the relationship between the self and its surroundings, in which the self is not something fixed but rather something that is always fresh and unfamiliar and continually being reborn.
Rirkrit TIRAVANIJA, Eighth chapter: return to the unknowing desire, the further one travels the closer one returns (to doubt), he wakes up under the tree, again, 2013
Screen print, metal foil, cast paper,
STPI handmade cotton paper,
stainless steel pedestal, 3D printed object
Canvas: H269.5 × W269.5 × D2.5cm
Pedestal: H18 × W100.5 × D18cm
Object: H8.5 × W4.5 × D8.5cm
© Rirkrit TIRAVANIJA/STPI
Photo: KIOKU Keizo
*Temporarily unavailable for viewing due to ongoing maintenance.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the foremost exponents of relational aesthetics, giving visual expression to relations by communicating with viewers in works such as pad thai (1990), in which he served Thai fried noodles in the gallery. He attempts to fictionalize people’s values by introducing everydayness into art spaces and uses unique methods to question existing frameworks, including history and social systems.
Eighth chapter: return to the unknowing desire, the further one travels the closer one returns (to doubt), he wakes up under the tree, again 2013
In 1895, British novelist H.G. WELLS published Time Machine, a novel that tells the story of the Time Traveler, a scientist who travels to the future in the year 802,701 A.D. Based on Wells' novel, Rirkrit Tiravanija has organized the work as a time traveler's log consisting of eight chapters, each one presenting a work that pairs a large silver print with a small object. Similar to a novel with connected chapters, each work is conceived as a gateway to the time machine, inviting the spectator to a different time and space. This work is the last chapter and pairs a wall print of the “Tree of Life” that illustrates Darwin's Theory of Evolution, with a 3D print of a character that looks like SpongeBob SquarePants placed in front of it. Darwin's illustration of how different species evolved from a common ancestor has been criticized as a recasting of the Western view of history, but it is well-known that evolution is simply the history of the diversification of the species, and that there is no single living creature at the apex. The sequence of Fibonacci numbers appearing in all eight chapters also reinforces the allusion to the time traveler's outlook on time. Tiravanija's chronicle in eight chapters does not arrive at any clear conclusion, but the fascinating observations and poetic language about time will linger into the future.
Born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1967.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer focuses on temporary relations to place, time and people by using electronic technology and the interface, on which body movements work directly. He develops a large-scale interactive installation, which actually relates to a building or place. His project, in which technology and history coexist and a concept of movement is strongly reflected, exposes the importance of complicity underlying in urban space, and explores to formulate new relations.
Pulse Room 2006
Around 300 incandescent light bulbs are arranged in a regular pattern overhead, hanging over the exhibition space. They light the space, each of the large 300 watt bulbs blinking on and off to its own rhythm. In Pulse Room, heartbeats are transformed into the rhythms of the blinking of lightbulbs. When a viewer holds onto hand grips on a stand set up inside the space, their heartbeat is detected by sensors and transformed into the blinking rhythm of the lightbulb in front of them. When they release their hands the rhythm is transferred to the bulbs overhead. Whenever a viewer’s heartbeat rhythm is recorded, the recording moves from one lightbulb to the next in succession. Proof of life in the form of the beating of the heart is expressed as the blinking of light through the direct action of touching. As suggested by Lozano-Hemmer’s likening of this work to a “memento mori,” the lights suspended in midair are indicative of an aggregate of vital forces while also calling to mind the impermanence of existence. The high-pitched sound of the lights blinking on and off that is audible if one strains one’s ears ripples through the space, the collection of different rhythms creating music that is complex, random, and continually changing.
YASURA Takeshi, cosmos, 2024
H210 × W30.5 × D30.5cm
Glacial meltwater, stones collected from
Annapurna, crystals distilled from camphor
tree, ammonium nitrate potassium chloride,
silk thread, marble, Sanbu cedar, glass,
silver, iron
The work produced with the support of the
Fondation d'entreprise Hermès
©Kenji Takahashi/Courtesy of Fondation
d'entreprise Hermès
Phase2: March 25 (Tue.) – May 11 (Sun.), 2025
Born in Shiga, Japan in 1984.
The objective of Yasura Takeshi’s practice is to acknowledge various organisms, including humans and other living and inanimate objects, as “beings.” He also engages in farming and beekeeping as part of his artistic practice, in addition to continuing to practice as an art mediator. Yasura’s production methods range from handicraft to the use of the latest technology. He also addresses the latent pros and cons of ecology and incorporates criticisms of the disparity that such a concept entails. While influenced by the Mono-ha school, Yasura also confronts the theme of ontology from the perspective of his own congenital disability, and explores the relationships between objects and human society that cannot be captured by theory alone.
cosmos 2024 (Gallery 5), glacier 2024 (Gallery 6)
In the spring of 2023, Yasura visited Annapurna, Nepal to conduct research on its hill tribes and collect glaciers. A monk whom he met during this trip told him that “water is necessary for all people. It sustains life and transcends race and social status.” In response, Yasura created this work, which suggests that water is the link that connects all living beings to each other. glacier consists of 24 photographs of a glacier melting in the palm of a hand arranged vertically in a row, depicting the relationship between the glacier and the artist’s own hand. In the scene positioned at eye level, the glacier has already turned to water, and only the hand is shown. This work expresses the artist’s hesitation over the question of how he, as a human being, should confront this world. cosmos is a glass sculpture made in the image of the organ of a living organism, and consists of objects that exchange information with the outside world, such as a storm glass that forecasts the weather and a radiometer that converts light energy into kinetic power. The solution in the storm glass consists of camphor, ammonium nitrate, sodium chloride, ethanol, and water from a melted glacier collected in Annapurna. Balanced at the top of the sculpture is a stone of the same weight, collected in the same area, in the shape of a yajirobe doll. The pedestal is made of marble and Sanbu cedar, materials that embody different time periods on this Earth. This work expresses the dynamic state of equilibrium of a wide variety of living beings as they interact within the context of their relationship with others.
Phase2: March 25 (Tue.) – May 11 (Sun.), 2025
Born in Garessio, Italy in 1947.
Penone has been active as one of the artists leading the Arte Povera art movement, which has swept across Italy in the late 1960s and on. He is known for his style of using original materials of the natural world as they are in his works, gracefully revealing the concealed nature of the material and its relationship with humans, especially the human body. In Japan, his work was first introduced at the “Between Man and Matter” exhibition (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1970). His large-scale exhibitions were held at the Centre Pompidou in 2004, and at Venice Biennale in 2007, which were highly evaluated.
Propagation 1995-1997
There are ten paraffin plates lined up on the floor. The first one has a slight hollow, and sealed in the center of it is a drawing with the artist’s fingerprint, covered with water. The water filling the surface of the paraffin plate shifts to the object of tree trunk-shaped glass, connecting the whole work that extends toward the end. The artist uses his fingerprint as a metaphor for a creative activity, and his fingerprint seems to be the source of his creativity. All paraffin, glass and water are variable substances, but here, glass and paraffin are fixed while only water adjusts delicately to the environment. Through this contrast, the ever-changing ephemeral phases of the environment and nature are shown even more clearly. The artist has succeeded in making their essences emerge through human intentional actions.
Phase2: March 25 (Tue) – May 11 (Sun), 2025
Born in Kagawa, Japan in 1918. Died there in 2012.
Around the age of 23, Nakagawa Yukio studied ikebana (flower arrangement) with his aunt, who belonged to the Ikenobo School. A collection of works that Nakagawa sent to Ikebana Geijutsu magazine in 1949 was commended by landscape architect SHIGEMORI Mirei, and Nakagawa subsequently joined Shigemori’s ikebana research group “Hakutosha.” Nakagawa left Ikenobo School in 1951. After he moved to Tokyo in 1956, he did not belong to any organization or school, and pursued ikebana on his own without taking any disciples. His solo exhibition entitled “Karaku” held in Ginza in 1984 was well received. Along with his avant-garde and revolutionary approach to flowers, the artist created glassworks and calligraphy. Having been influenced by late photographer Domon Ken, he also took photographs. He was awarded the 2nd Oribe Award in 1999 and the 11th Japan Arts Council Prize in 2004.
Untitled (Karaku) 1984
Nakagawa’s “Karaku” series was first shown in his solo exhibition at Ginza Jiyugaoka Gallery in 1984.He dropped extracted flower essence on calligraphic paper and placed many water-soaked sponges over it. The color of the flower essence was dark at first, but as time passed by, it changed to bright purple, blue, and then brown on paper. He extracted flower sap to represent flowers and fixed their hidden colors on paper. This act indicates that he was trying to grasp the true nature of flowers, confronting the roots of life in flowers by using his body. Untitled (Karaku) is the largest-scale piece in the series. The blurred colors of flower sap that spread all over the picture like a magnificent big flower symbolize vitality together with black seeds left behind here and there.
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1964.
Gimhongsok directs a critical gaze at contemporary society in creating artworks in a variety of media including drawing, sculpture and video. Through his creation of a fictional society he gives expression in a humorous, ironical fashion to the
problems of labor, education, inequality and ethics that arise among people of different cultural backgrounds and social classes. Deviating from fixed ideas, he pointedly poses questions on the evils of unawareness and the lack of thinking underlying all manner of subjects.
This is Rabbit 2005
This is Rabbit is an installation piece in which a rabbit costume and accompanying texts form a set. The text explains that the person in the rabbit costume is an illegal immigrant worker, that they are performing at the museum, and that they are being paid for the performance. As well as showing in an extremely simple manner the relationship between employment and labor, the work also asks questions concerning “ethics,” such as whether any kind of relationship is possible as long as compensation is paid. The problems concerning immigration and illegal residence highlighted in this work are both an extension of the earnest studies carried out by the artist himself as someone from the Korean peninsula, which is divided into North Korea and South Korea, and an issue of concern to global society as a whole.
Born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1989. Died in Kagawa in 2015.
During his brief career of about nine years, Nakazono Koji produced an extraordinary number of paintings, numbering approximately 600, and established a distinctive style that epitomizes the globalized nature of the online era. He drew on a wide array of sources, including modern and contemporary (post-1990s) painting, anime, manga, film, and the vast and immeasurable trove of images available online, in works rooted in the sensibilities and values of the post-internet generation. His paintings depict an array of entities occupying a zone between the human and the inhuman, capturing the volatile nature of human existence and relationships in an era of information overload.
Untitled 2008, Untitled c. 2009, Untitled 2012, Untitled 2012, Untitled 2012, Untitled 2014, Untitled 2014, Untitled c. 2015, Untitled Date Unknown, Untitled Date Unknown
The 10 pieces in the museum’s collection span his entire career, from early works made during his time at Tokyo University of the Arts, to those made after he graduated and embarked on his career in 2012, and finally to works from around 2015 when he relocated to Takamatsu, Japan, just prior to his untimely death, illustrating the evolution of his diverse practice over the years. Nakazono’s superimposition of multiple motifs on abstract color fields generates unique pictorial spaces. His dynamic application of paint with the fingers recalls the action of swiping on a smartphone screen, while his color fields and lines produced with an excessive density of scribbled crayon evoke the deluge of data and images that characterizes present-day society. Endeavoring to generate immersive, ambient spaces, Nakazono frequently presented his work in the form of installations covering walls with multiple paintings rather than displaying single paintings in isolation.
Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1962.
Homma Takashi studied photography at the Department of Art, Nihon University. Starting in the late 1980s, he began taking photographs for advertising, mainly in Japanese and overseas fashion magazines, and for CD jackets. As a parallel activity, he also started to photograph cities and suburban “new towns” (planned communities), with special attention paid to the children in them. He has exhibited these works, in which he maintains a characteristic distance from his subject, in numerous photographic series. In 1999, he won the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award for his series “TOKYO SUBURBIA.” In 2004, he made the movie KIWAMETE YOI FUKEI (Extremely Good Scenery), which features the photographer NAKAHIRA Takuma.
Trails 2009
The “attempt at interrogating various ways of looking at the world using photography,” as Homma describes it, is contained within each series. Red stains on the snow, fallen trees, and footprints that seem to have been left behind by animals. Are these traces of the “fact” that the beast fled while shedding blood? Homma’s series of photographs titled Trails documents what appears to be an endless trail of blood on the snow. What these trails tell us, however, is never made explicit. This series also demonstrates Homma’s attempt to interrogate the medium of photography itself. The viewer is compelled to confront the essence of the photographic medium as they waver between the “facts” captured in these photographs and the “stories” they allude to.
Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1969.
Since the 1990s, Koie Makiko has consistently produced photographic studies of nature and crowds at racecourses, baseball stadiums, and the like on large panels. In these works, rather than capturing her subjects objectively, Koie conjures up a world resembling an imagined scene by blurring or overlapping the images and using subtle color tones. The panels, in which images are often superimposed to form several layers, have an air of tranquillity as if they were part of a distant memory.
From the series “P,” P-17 2001, From the series “P,” P-28 2001
These works all depict crowds. The actual images are of crowds gathered at racecourses, baseball stadiums, and the like, and were later blown up to fit the large panels. The images are formed as layers upon layers of people whose figures appear blurred and overlapped. The people look as though they are undulating from side to side, and the pale color tones make it even more difficult to distinguish people’s faces. Throughout her process, Koie repeatedly makes slight color adjustments that impart delicacy and depth to the work. Although her subject matter is enthusiastic crowds that evoke images of “regularity” and “uniformity,” in contrast to most photographers who approach such subjects coolly and objectively, Koie has transformed the images into a sensual world resembling an imagined scene, luring us into the depths of our consciousness.
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation)
SunM Color Co,. Ltd.
THE HOKKOKU SHIMBUN