EXHIBITIONS

Tokyo International Gallery presents a solo exhibition
by Masayuki Arai
“Visible／Vanishing／Drawn／Unpainting”

Tokyo International Gallery (Shinagawa / Tennoz) is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “Visible／Vanishing／Drawn／Unpainting” by Masayuki Arai, opening on Saturday, November 1, 2025.

Arai’s practice begins with imagining the space beyond a photograph affixed to the canvas. Paint, discharged through a syringe, accumulates in multiple layers on the surface, gradually transforming into a complex and singular image.

The title Visible / Invisible / Paintable / Unpaintable reflects the very process of his creation. While continuing to paint what lies beyond the visible in the photograph, Arai eventually stops his hand. Confronted with the resulting work, viewers are drawn into their own chain of imagination from a different standpoint than the artist.

This exhibition will present approximately ten new works that trace various stages of this process. We invite you to experience Arai’s transversal practice, which moves fluidly between reality and imagination.

―Exhibition Statement―

The Like painting series begins with sourcing photographs from the internet and attaching them to the canvas. From there, I expand the image by imaginatively painting what lies outside the photographic frame. Through this process, the space of painting emerges.
Instead of a brush, I use a syringe to deposit paint—a method that allows me to engage simultaneously with paint as material substance and with painting as illusion. The rectangular traces left on the surface mark the removal of the photographs, signaling the transition from photograph to painting. In some works, this act is layered with multiple photographs.
Why place a photograph on the canvas? It is an attempt to question the very beginning of painting—or, conversely, to relinquish it. Even without a clearly defined subject or theme, painting can come into being. Since Surrealism, an interest in the unconscious and in chance has linked painting to the act of “encounter.” Today, this is no longer a mere re-enactment, but rather a framework that bridges reality and imagination within the contemporary information environment. From this idea arose the act of extending a photograph outward through imagination. And the question “where does it begin?” inevitably invites the question “where does it end?”
The daily flood of uploaded images and videos intersects with the realities grasped by our bodies. Reality and imagination fragment and overlap, and their boundaries are increasingly lost. While photographs cut out and present a part of reality, advances in image manipulation—and now the emergence of generative AI—have subverted this very premise. Our sense of reality not only shifts from person to person, but wavers already at a deeper, more fundamental stage.
In neuroscience, it has been pointed out that the human capacity to distinguish boundaries is never complete, leaving us vulnerable to misrecognition between reality and imagination. Painting embodies a similar condition: viewed up close, only the sheer materiality of paint is perceivable; from a distance, an image emerges. At what point does this visual inversion between substance and image occur in front of a painting? And is it truly possible to share that boundary?
The syringe method restricts arbitrariness, continually posing the question of when paint becomes image. Within the simultaneous processes of generation and collapse, the traditional notion of “completion” is rendered obsolete. It is precisely in this lack of freedom, in things not going as intended, that my relationship with painting resides. By absorbing fragments from the outside, passing them through the inside, and opening them outward once again, painting breathes—like the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation.　
Arai Masayuki