Alpha Contemporary (Tokyo) and Alt Projects (LA) present The Waves, 2025 at Asian Art Fair Fukuoka in September 2025.

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“Each wave brings in countless shining mornings.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

This exhibition brings together women artists from both sides of the Pacific—Tokyo and Los Angeles—showcasing diverse voices through painting, performance, and fabric-based works.

The Waves, 2025 reflects how culture, history, and personal narratives surge and recede like the sea. Each work resonates with the rhythm of the tides—sometimes clashing, sometimes quietly seeping into one another.

Like Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, time unfolds in ripples, and voices travel across distances. Yet these voices do not remain fixed to one shore; instead, they cross boundaries, shaping new landscapes.

 

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.​​​​