Japanese Pop Trio II

Gallery 508 presents Japanese Pop Trio II, an exhibition bringing together three Japanese artists from different generations, each with a distinct visual language: Mayumi Tsuzuki, Haruna Shikata, and Yutaka Shimomura.

The exhibition explores how images and memories are formed, accumulated, and transformed within today’s visual culture. While all three artists work primarily through painting, their points of departure and approaches to the image differ.

Mayumi Tsuzuki draws upon memories of growing up in suburban Tokyo during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth, translating her fascination with the American culture of the time into a distinctive landscape of “American Nostalgia.” Familiar yet ambiguous landscapes and figures intersect across her canvases, blurring the boundary between memory and imagination.

Haruna Shikata’s work begins with the concept of “Overwrite,” continuously revisiting memory, emotion, and personal experience. She transforms images drawn from photographs, text, and drawings, combining digital printing with painterly gestures to create new layers of perception.

Yutaka Shimomura explores the contemporary environment in which images are endlessly reproduced and consumed through smartphones and social media. Building up layers through screen printing and physically scraping into the surface, he examines the relationship between digital images and the physical world, reality and imagination.

From landscapes rooted in memory to images encountered on digital screens, the works of these three artists reveal how personal experience and the visual culture of different generations are transformed through painting.

Through these distinct perspectives, Japanese Pop Trio II considers how contemporary Japanese painting expands the familiar visual language of “pop” through personal experience and the sensibilities of different generations.