Full description from the venue
SOS marks Eimei Kaneyama ’s fourth solo exhibition at Whistle. Against a backdrop of intensifying conflict and geopolitical instability, Kaneyama draws on fragments of events he has encountered, abstracting and connecting them to form a broader narrative. In this sense, the exhibition brings to mind Pablo Picasso’s Guernica , which transcended the depiction of a single historical event to reveal the collective trauma and anxiety left in the wake of war. Just as Picasso used fragmented imagery to transform the devastation of the bombing into a universal narrative of loss and fear, Kaneyama translates the crises and turmoil of the present into abstract forms, making visible an emotional landscape shared by individuals and society.
Throughout the exhibition, Kaneyama weaves together images and symbols to trace moments in which war and negotiation, loss and mourning, care and response intersect amidst conflicts between nations. Rather than documenting any one event, the narrative that emerges resembles a distress signal exchanged among those living through these uncertain times. SOS is both a cry for help and a resolve to respond to the suffering of others. It becomes a form of language that, even amidst rupture and turmoil, allows people to remain connected and sustain relationships.
The works presented throughout the exhibition recall events and memories from Kaneyama’s own experiences. The panda drawings and plush figure take the return of the giant panda Eimei to China as their point of departure. China has long practiced “panda diplomacy,” using giant pandas as symbols of friendship between nations. Born in China in 1992, Eimei spent nearly thirty years at Adventure World in Japan, where he became lovingly known as “Super Papa” after fathering sixteen cubs. Eimei was returned to China in 2023 and died just two years later. As Japan’s remaining pandas were returned to China one after another, the country was left without any giant pandas for the first time in more than half a century, bringing its long history of caring for them to an end in 2026. More than a simple relocation, Eimei’s return marked a rupture in the memories and relationships that a community had built together over several years.
Rather than fading with time, this sense of rupture continues to shift and resurface within the layers of memory. For Kaneyama, painting does not serve to document this process, but becomes a site for contemplating the moment when memory recedes, lingering only as a trace. In the three works from the B&W series, each developed over an extended period of time, existing images are gradually erased as new forms slowly emerge. The remnants of the erased images gather across the surface, creating a landscape in which different times and memories coexist.
At times, Kaneyama draws on moments he has captured in his own photographs as material for his paintings. Since 2013, he has photographed discarded banana peels found on the street. Suggesting the instant before someone falls, these images function as metaphors for a threshold in time, where the present turns into the past while also anticipating a future that has yet to arrive. Just as past, present, and future can overlap within a single event, Kaneyama brings a nonlinear sense of time onto the canvas. From the North (2025) likewise takes as its source an archive of cloud photographs that the artist has developed since 2017. Even when looking at the same sky, each person discovers different forms and meanings within it, and clouds become both a source of comfort and a medium through which memories return. Human beings are continually transformed by the passage of time, yet the clouds we repeatedly look up at can seem to remain unchanged, suspended in the same place. Through this paradox, Kaneyama explores what changes and what endures, as well as the ways in which personal memory and emotion shape our perception of the world.
This exploration of time and memory ultimately leads to the question of how we might care for one another in moments of crisis. The potato paintings and drawings at the end of the exhibition draw on the potato’s ability to grow in almost any environment. Kaneyama imagines the potato as a form of “SOS food” for survival in times of crisis and seeks to share it with visitors. More than a simple source of nourishment, the potato becomes a modest symbol of care, capable of sustaining another person’s life.
There comes a moment in everyone’s life when they feel the need to send out an SOS. The signal may be sent quietly or desperately from a point where anxiety and tension, loss and hope intersect. Unforeseen events and accidents may descend upon us without warning, yet we try to listen for and respond to the signals of those we hold dear. However slight or uncertain that response may be, care opens the possibility of connecting one another even amidst despair. A single potato placed in the exhibition is not a grand solution, but a modest gesture extended toward another person: a distress signal for how we might go on living together.