EXHIBITIONS

Tokyo International Gallery presents Threshold of Emergence,
a solo exhibition by Towa Takaya

Tokyo International Gallery (Shinagawa–Tennoz, Tokyo) is pleased to announce Threshold of Emergence, a solo exhibition by Towa Takaya, on view from Wednesday, September 9 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.

Exquisite colors, elaborate texture, and a wavering, unique depth—these qualities that characterize Takaya’s paintings are achieved not only through commercial paints and pigments, but also through coloring materials she makes herself from ingredients with distinctive optical properties, such as polarizing pearl, metal, and CO2-derived polymer, as well as materials derived from specific regions, such as earth, ash, and minerals.

What underlies her practice of layering diverse materials is a perspective that sees the world not as something that exists independently, outside of oneself, but as what emerges as an experience through the mutual interference between body and things. This exhibition, too, can be located in the extension of this perspective.

This perspective has deepened into more specific questions, especially since she began working with diverse materials. In recent years, Takaya’s interest has shifted from expressing color in itself to the behavior of materials that give rise to color. How materials manifest different phases and transform the experience of seeing —in relation to light, environment, viewpoint, and body—has become the central question of her current practice.

Since images are not fixed entities but phenomena that emerge differently each time, the viewer’s body also forms part of the place in which the image-world emerges. Placing one’s body before the artworks, shifting one’s position, and yielding to the surrounding environment—such an experience opens only in this place. We invite you to experience what world emerges through the interplay of body, material, and the light and space of Tokyo International Gallery.

＝Exhibition Statement＝

Dissipative structures are associated with an entirely different ordering principle, which may be called order through fluctuation. — Ilya Prigogine

A phenomenon is not an object that exists prior to meaning, but a site of interaction constituted each time through its relation to the distribution of intensities, environmental conditions, temporal change, and the perceiving body.

What this exhibition attends to is the process of minute displacement that occurs before this site is absorbed into a stable image or meaning. As one action shifts into another, one order into another, one value into its opposite, phenomenon no longer submits to being grasped through a single property.
There, the familiar takes on uncanny qualities, a gentle atmosphere transforms into an uncontrollable force, and what appears destructive re-emerges as a condition for becoming. Yet this inversion does not occur as a dramatic rupture. Rather, it unfolds at the very periphery of perception—through density, trace, particle, light, and the shifts in perspective.

The threshold in this exhibition is not a mere border. It is a critical site that appears in the moment just before meaning takes hold, or in the passage through which dissolved meaning reconstitutes itself into another order.

This exhibition is an attempt to witness that critical moment.

Towa Takaya