Alpha Contemporary presents The Waves, 2025 at Art Fair Asia Fukuoka in September 2025. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, this exhibition explores how contemporary women artists translate shifting sensations, changing perspectives, and emotional currents formed through relationships into visual language.

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 “Each wave brings with it a multitude of morning lights.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Like Woolf’s narrative structure, in which multiple voices and inner rhythms converge into a continuous flow, this exhibition focuses on the sensory structures formed through the intersection of diverse artistic approaches and viewpoints.

 

 Arisa Nakabayashi (Japanese b.1992) expresses contemporary female sensibility through botanical and figurative imagery. Hyun-sun Jo (Korean b.1981) deconstructs and reconstructs pictorial structures to explore temporality and variation. Sayaka Toda (Japanese b.1988) reveals subtle boundaries of gender and identity through figures in which opposing elements coexist.

Their works do not converge toward fixed meanings or singular narratives. Instead, through painterly elements such as bleeding edges, repetition, rhythm, and visual tension, they articulate constantly shifting states of perception.

 

 Through these works, The Waves, 2025 presents the ways in which contemporary women artists perceive and respond to the world as an interconnected flow. Viewers are invited to layer their own perspectives and sensibilities within this current, encountering multiple possibilities of interpretation and experience.

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Artist Introductions

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Arisa Nakabayashi（Japanese b.1992）

Nakabayashi’s paintings explore contemporary Japanese society through the female gaze, using human figures and botanical motifs. Her bold brushwork and vivid color contrasts blur the boundary between representation and abstraction, rendering her canvases emotionally charged yet open-ended—visual spaces where sensation overrides narrative.

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Hyun-sun Jo (Korean b.1981)

Hyun-sun Jo re-tunes the language of painting within its structural framework. By cutting and recombining fragments of past works, she explores the conditions of abstraction and painting, while experimenting with temporality and variation through series structured after musical rhythm.

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Sayaka Toda (Japanese b.1988)

In this exhibition, Sayaka Toda revisits and reconfigures her early series “Where Beauty Resides”, originally created during her university years. The works portray ambiguous figures in which seemingly opposing elements—beauty and ugliness, vulnerability and strength, masculinity and femininity—coexist and blur.

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Through this nuanced exploration of duality, Toda reflects on gender as a complex and fluid construct, quietly echoing broader social questions within Japanese society. The Where Beauty Resides series is part of the Takahashi Collection, known for its focus on contemporary Japanese art addressing pressing cultural and societal themes.​​​​