Kitchenism — All about kitchen — begins with the kitchen, a space at the center of everyday life that often goes unnoticed.

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The kitchen is a site of repetitive daily labor, but also a space where multiple senses constantly intersect: the sound of running water and cooking food, its aromas, and the tactile experience of handling ingredients. It is also a place where family memories accumulate, where efficiency and order are required, and where changes in ways of living and social values become particularly visible across different times and cultures.

 

This exhibition approaches the kitchen not simply as a domestic space, but as a site where everyday life, sensory experience, memory, and culture overlap.

 

Kanako Ohya (Japanese b.1983) combines scenes from everyday life with images drawn from old photographs, newspapers, magazines, and the internet, constructing psychological spaces in which reality and fiction, anxiety and desire intersect. Intense reds and oranges function as boundaries within and beyond the pictorial space, while revealing the uncertainty and tension latent beneath the surface of everyday life.

 

Wataru Ozu (Japanese b.1991) revisits the fundamental genres of painting—still life, landscape, and portraiture—through references to diverse images and pictorial conventions from art history, ranging from East Asian landscape painting and ukiyo-e to Western painting. For this exhibition, works featuring apples scattered across the floor, compositions recalling classical still life, and a new work referencing the Spanish tradition of bodegón reconsider the historical relationship between the kitchen and still-life painting within a contemporary pictorial context.

 

Yuri Kezuka (Japanese b.1984) recreates everyday objects and domestic fixtures—such as sponges and detergent containers—using clay, one of the most elemental materials. Stripped of their original functions, these familiar objects become unfamiliar presences, inviting us to reconsider the conventions of everyday life and the meanings we assign to ordinary things.

 

Suk-young Lim (Korean) draws on the late-Joseon traditions of chaekgado and chaekgeori, extending the domestic objects and kitchenware found within these historical paintings into contemporary pictorial space. The world of objects traditionally depicted alongside books, writing implements, everyday possessions, and treasured items is reconstructed through mineral pigments derived from natural materials, bringing past material culture and contemporary daily life into a shared visual field.

 

Through the practices of four artists working across different cultural contexts, historical references, and media, Kitchenism invites us to look again at a space we encounter every day: the kitchen—as a site of repetitive labor, a repository of sensory experience and memory, and a place where relationships between people and objects become particularly tangible.

 

During the exhibition, stainless-steel cookware by the German kitchenware brand Fissler was installed alongside the artworks. Artist talks and related programs further expanded the exhibition’s exploration of the diverse experiences and perspectives surrounding the kitchen as an everyday space.