Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931), this exhibition explores the flow of sensations that emerge between painting and sculpture, surface and space, and body and landscape.

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“Islands of light are swimming on the grass.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

 

In The Waves, Woolf portrays a world continuously shaped by the overlapping voices and perceptions of individuals, revealing an ever-shifting movement of sensations.

The Waves: Kyoto extends this fluid structure into the relationships between painting and sculpture, surface and space, body and landscape, reinterpreting them within the open architecture of a Buddhist temple.

As a new exploration within Alpha Contemporary’s ongoing The Waves series, the exhibition approaches landscape not simply as a visual subject, but as a fluid space that emerges through the movement of the body and the senses.

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Arisa Nakabayashi (Japanese, b.1992) explores human perception and the distance between oneself and others through the motifs of plants and landscapes.

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Her paintings bring together the perspective of those observing plants and the imagined perspective of the plants themselves, transforming the anxieties and forms of oppression embedded in contemporary society into shifting landscapes.

Within her compositions, fragmented and panoramic viewpoints coexist, drawing viewers into a constantly shifting sensory experience rather than presenting a fixed landscape.

 

Through rapid brushstrokes, fluid washes, and bold contrasts of complementary colors, her paintings move beyond the representation of landscape to evoke a sense of air, temperature, distance, and bodily perception.

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Ryoichi Fujisaki (Japanese, b.1975) creates sculptures that express the sense of spatial expansiveness experienced when encountering vast natural landscapes or karesansui, traditional Japanese dry landscape gardens.

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The organic forms generated through bodily movement undergo repeated processes of integration and disintegration, emerging not as fixed structures but as continually transforming landscapes.

His sculptures extend beyond their immediately visible forms, making perceptible the invisible spaces, rhythms, and expanded bodily sensations that seem to continue beyond them.

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Although the two artists work in different forms, both explore landscapes that emerge not from a fixed viewpoint but through the movement of the body and the senses.

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Painting generates a flow through space, while sculpture intervenes in that flow like a trace of the body appearing within it.

In this exhibition, a painting composed of multiple panels unfolds like a traditional Japanese folding screen within the temple, allowing the landscape itself to expand into the surrounding space. As viewers move through the exhibition, the work reveals itself as a flowing landscape that changes with their physical movement.

 

Rather than occupying a conventional white-cube space divided by partitions, the exhibition unfolds within the open architecture of a Buddhist temple.

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The artworks do not exist as isolated objects. Instead, their relationships continually shift according to the distances between them, the light, the air, and the movements of visitors.

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Through the sensory waves generated where landscape and body, stillness and movement, and individual elements and surrounding space intersect, The Waves: Kyoto seeks to gently transform the temple space itself.