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News & Notes
Nigh Magazine
2025.5.16 update


Koshiro
Kihara’s

New

Solo Show



“The Allegory of Beginnings”:
Painting the Landscape Before It Had a Name








Koshiro Kihara’s solo exhibition “The Allegory of Beginning” is on view at ARTDYNE through June 1, featuring new paintings that evoke “first landscapes” shaped from clay and paint.





Dwelling in the ever-shifting, ambiguous boundary between figuration and abstraction, artist Koshiro Kihara has continued to shape and reflect his perspective through the act of painting. His third solo exhibition, The Allegory of Beginnings, is currently on view at ARTDYNE in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, through Sunday, June 1.

As seen in his interview in Nigh Issue 8, Kihara does not approach landscape as a reproduction of nature, but rather as something to be reinterpreted―understood in terms of structure and arrangement. That same gaze quietly breathes through his latest works: scenes in which materials like clay and paint, touched by light and shadow, are transformed into what one might call “landscapes.”

This exhibition presents a new series of works born from Kihara’s ongoing inquiry into what he calls the “first landscape”―a state that precedes names and meaning. Building on the works featured in Issue 8, these new paintings more vividly trace his ongoing inquiry into the origins of memory and landscape through the act of painting.

It is an experience that draws us back to the tactile presence of color and form, to a time before the world had been divided by language. We invite you to encounter, in person, the quiet emergence of that “beginning” he evokes on canvas.




Artist Statement






The motifs in my work are clay and paint themselves. However, just as sunlight filters through trees, casting shadows and creating a landscape, the motifs I depict―while rooted in raw material―also become landscapes shaped by the laws of nature, imbued with light, gravity, and air.

I take these landscapes made of clay and paint and crop them into rectangular forms. The resulting images unexpectedly connect with memory, evoking something familiar. At the same time, they seem to restore something known to me to its truest, most original form.

I believe I am trying to paint that very first landscape―a time before names, when the world was still only color and form.


Koshiro Kihara








Overview

Koshiro Kihara – The Allegory of Beginnings

Dates: May 10 (Sat) – June 1 (Sun), 2025
Hours: 12:00 – 19:00 (Closed Mon, Tue, Wed)
Venue: ARTDYNE
Venue: 2F Koura Daiichi Bldg, 1-1-6 Kayabacho, Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Venue: www.art-dyne.com　









Map




All images © of their respective owners.


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