Alpha Contemporary is proud to present 「A Room of Her Own: Asian Women, Tokyo Sensibility - from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of Ones's Own"」from July 11 to July 13, 2025, at Tryst 2025 that is an international art fair for artist-run-spaces and collectives as well as an international gathering to address the needs and future of global exchange for artist-run spaces, collectives and organizations, run through the Torrance Art Museum (TAM) and the City of Torrance.

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The phrase A Room of Her Own echoes Virginia Woolf’s enduring assertion that women need space—both physical and metaphorical—to create. Here, seven Asian women artists reimagine that room not as a retreat, but as an active site of transformation.

 

This exhibition unfolds a constellation of rooms—quiet, layered, charged, and ambiguous. Constructed through painting, textiles, print, and gesture, each work presents a personal site shaped by memory, emotion, and sensory trace. These are not simply domestic reflections, but artistic spaces where identity is formed, refracted, and inhabited.

 

Tokyo serves as both backdrop and atmosphere—a place of intensity and contradiction, precision and ambiguity. And in the undercurrents of these works, we sense a shared yet multifaceted language: intimate but unsentimental, assertive yet porous.

 

In these rooms, becoming is not a final form, but an ongoing act.

 

At times, scenes such as Los Angeles swimming pools and Western imagery surface, evoking a dissonant blend of the familiar and the foreign.

 

Artist Introductions

 

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.

 

Namu Choi (Korean b.1978)

Choi creates psychological landscapes that reflect the tension between individual and environment. In this series of large-scale paintings featuring swimming pools, vibrant colors and layered surface textures evoke both control and vulnerability, refracting moments of solitude into scenes of saturated stillness.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Kanako Ohya （Japanese b.1983）

Ohya constructs dreamlike rooms in hues of orange and gold—spaces that are both tender and unsettling. Her work captures the fragile desire and inner turmoil of young women, evoking a world suspended between fantasy and constraint.

 

Huang Yuqi (Chinaese b.1997)

In The Order of Things series, Huang assembles everyday fabrics like towels and curtains into sculptural cubes that act as vessels of time. Her stitched flat works extend this metaphor, transforming the body's gesture into marks of memory and spatial rhythm. Through these delicate material interventions, the home becomes a mutable chronicle of presence.

 

Seo-hyeon Moon (Korean b.1982)

Moon works with scraps of traditional garments—hanbok, wedding dresses, and kimono—to create patchwork pieces that bridge craft and painting. Her Butterfly Series features intricately hand-sewn wings, each one a radiant trace of time and selfhood. These works turn domestic labor into poetic abstraction.

 

Miro Kim (Korean b.1975)

Kim uses printmaking and collage to construct subtly layered images based on plants. She prints a single plate using multiple techniques—etching, drypoint, silkscreen—then overlaps the fragments to form a rich visual palimpsest. Her plants are more than botanical forms; they are delicate maps of memory, emotion, and shifting psychological states.

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