Curated by Younggi P. Tanaka 

 Alpha Contemporary presents A Room of Her Own: East Asian Women, Tokyo Sensibility — Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at Tryst 2025, an international art fair for artist-run spaces and collectives that seeks to foster exchange and solidarity across global art communities, taking place from July 11 to 13, 2025.

 

 The event is organized by the Torrance Art Museum (TAM) and the City of Torrance.

Taking its title from Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, the exhibition introduces the sensorial and intimate “rooms” constructed by seven East Asian women artists, set against the backdrop of Tokyo. Here, the “room” is not merely a physical space, but a psychological landscape shaped by accumulated emotions, memories, bodily experiences, and time—a private scene in which one confronts oneself.

 

 This exhibition does not seek to directly interpret or reenact Woolf’s original text. Rather, it expands upon Woolf’s notion of the “room” by reframing it through the lived conditions and sensibilities of contemporary women artists today. In this context, the “room” functions both as a tangible space—such as a home or studio—and as a personal standpoint from which each artist perceives and interprets the world.

 

 The “rooms” presented in this exhibition are not retreats isolated from society, but interior spaces that quietly intersect with and remain in tension with the external world. Composed of layered emotions, memories, bodies, language, and time, these spaces reveal distinct ways of relating to reality.

 

 The unique pace, density, and emotional atmosphere of Tokyo permeate these rooms, while Western images—such as swimming pools in Los Angeles—intersect to create scenes that feel both familiar and subtly estranged. What emerges is a sensorial world shaped by East Asian women artists from their respective positions, offering a contemporary reinterpretation of what it means to claim “a room of one’s own” today.

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Artists

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Arisa Nakabayashi（Japanese b.1992）

 Arisa Nakabayashi works between figuration and abstraction, translating the lived sensations of contemporary Japanese society through a female gaze. Human figures and botanical forms emerge through bleeding edges, rapid brushwork, and charged color contrasts. Her paintings function less as representations than as emotional fields—spaces where perception, intuition, and social awareness quietly converge.

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Namu Choi (Korean b.1978)

 Namu Choi visualizes interior psychological landscapes shaped by the tension between the individual and their environment. In this exhibition, the motif of the swimming pool becomes a site of projection—at once controlled and exposed. Saturated colors and layered surfaces hold moments of solitude, reflecting urban isolation and restrained desire within seemingly calm, contained spaces.

 

Sayaka Toda (Japanese b.1988)

 For this exhibition, Sayaka Toda revisits Where Beauty Resides, a series originally developed during her university years and reconfigured for the present context. The works depict ambiguous figures in which opposing elements—beauty and ugliness, vulnerability and strength, masculinity and femininity—coexist without resolution. Through these layered presences, Toda approaches gender as a fluid and unstable condition, quietly resonating with broader questions within contemporary Japanese society.

 

 The Where Beauty Resides series is part of the Takahashi Collection, known for its focus on socially engaged contemporary Japanese art.

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Kanako Ohya （Japanese b.1983）

 Kanako Ohya constructs dreamlike interiors rendered in tones of orange and gold. These rooms feel tender yet unsettled—spaces suspended between fantasy and constraint. Through subtly distorted perspectives and quiet symbolic elements, her paintings evoke the fragile desires and inner turbulence of young women, revealing emotional states that hover between concealment and disclosure.

 

Huang Yuqi (Chinese b.1997)

 In The Order of Things series, Huang Yuqi reconfigures everyday textiles—towels, curtains, clothing—into sculptural cubes that function as vessels of time. Each form carries traces of memory and emotion, recording the transformation of domestic space through lived experience. In her flat works, stitched marks register bodily gesture and suspended time, allowing material and memory to intersect on the surface.

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Seo-hyeon Moon (Korean b.1982)

​ Seo-hyeon Moon works with fragments of traditional garments—hanbok, wedding dresses, and kimono—assembling them into patchwork compositions that bridge craft and painting. Her Butterfly Series features intricately hand-sewn wings, each one a concentrated trace of time, emotion, and personal history. These works transform domestic labor into a quiet, luminous visual language.

 

Miro Kim (Korean b.1975)

 Miro Kim employs printmaking techniques—etching, drypoint, and silkscreen—to generate layered images that are later reassembled through collage. Using plants as her primary motif, she constructs visual palimpsests where multiple impressions overlap. These botanical forms function not as representations of nature, but as delicate maps of memory, emotion, and shifting psychological states—interior landscapes rendered through repetition and accumulation.