CURRENT EXHIBITION

Yasumi Hakoshima
" Hello "

June 13 (Sat) - July 26 (Sun), 2026

Gallery 38 is pleased to announce "Hello," the first solo exhibition of Yasumi Hakoshima, opening onSaturday June 13th. Organized in collaboration with nantenshi gallery, which has been supported Hakoshima's work since the beginning of her career, the show brings together new works alongside pieces from her earlier and recent years, offering a comprehensive view of her practice.

Shaped by the years she spent in Southeast Asia as a child, Hakoshima's work is rooted in the cities,streets, and quiet presence of the people who inhabit them. She has made repeated visits to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other countries, gathering sketches and photographs on location. In recent years, based in Japan, she has developed a distinctive approach in which real landscapes are reconstructed into her own pictorial space. Her canvases are filled with figures paused on street corners, passing scenery, lush and colorful plants, building facades, and signboards ̶ fragmentary motifs that carry no clear narrative, caught mid-scene as if the world simply continued beyond the frame. There is a particular vibrancy to her work, and one can feel in it the intense light and humidity she experienced in Southeast Asia.

Multiple viewpoints and moments in time are folded into a single image, where distant and near, memory and present, quietly meet. This layered structure lies at the heart of Hakoshima's work. Figures often occupy the center of the composition, yet they appear less as protagonists of a story than as presences drifting between landscape and person ̶ their warm, slightly comic forms lending the work a gentle humor. This quality of anonymity lifts personal memory into something more universal, inviting each viewer to find their own experience within it. Surrounding elements ̶ plants, architecture, everyday objects ̶. assert their own presence through strong color and bold composition, bringing tension and rhythm to the whole. Gathered and reassembled, these fragmented images hold layers of time within them, opening a space somewhere between reality and imagination. Hakoshima speaks of being drawn to scenes that are "rich and dense." The sturdiness built over many years, the way effort and experience show in a person's face and posture, a style ripened into something entirely one's own, the quiet strength of someone simply going their own way ̶ she is drawn to the moment when accumulated time becomes visible, and carries it back to the studio in sketches and photographs. Abroad, the difference from familiar cultures and customs makes the appearance and manner of people feel vivid and new. At home in Japan, the challenge ̶ and the ongoing pursuit ̶ is to find the same quality of seeing. Her ideal is to encounter something she simply wants to draw, wherever she happens to be, and she continues to uncover the depth of time hidden within everyday life.

This exhibition offers a chance to trace how the themes Hakoshima has long explored ̶ the structure of memory, the reconstruction of perspective ̶ have evolved and deepened over time. The fresh immediacy found in her earlier work and the refined spatial awareness of her recent pieces together mark a quiet, continuous accumulation of thought. Behind the vivid colors and bold compositions lies a layering of time. With past and present rising together in the same space, this exhibition looks back at where Hakoshima has been ̶ and forward to where she is going.

[ Yasumi Hakoshima ]
Born in 1979. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria in 2000 and graduated from Tokyo Zokei University, Department of Fine Arts, Painting Major in 2002. Selected for the Gunma Biennale for Young Artists 2010 and participated in VOCA 2014 at The Ueno Royal Museum. The artist has held solo exhibitions regularly at nantenshi gallery, Tokyo, including “That’s the spirit! “(2011), “My Life” (2012), “Vivid living” (2014), “With the times”(2016), “Floating in the city”(2018), “Works on Paper” (2021) and “Let’s meet again” (2023). Group exhibitions include Contemporary Art “CRUSH ON LOVE” (2016) and Mythology of Retina - Mythology- (2018) at Sezon Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibition Detail：

Yasumi Hakoshima
" Hello "

Date: June 13 (Sat) - July 26 (Sun), 2026
The artist will be at the gallery on June 13th (Sat)
Opening reception: June 13 (Sat) 17:00-19:00

Opening hours: 12:00 - 19:00
Closed on: Mon, Tue and National Holidays
*Please note that details are subject to change without notice. For the latest updates, please check our social media.

Venue : Gallery 38
2-30-28 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku Tokyo
tel: +81(0)3 6721 1505
email: contact@gallery-38.com