Tochihara Toshiko
Information
- Period
- October 2 (Fri.)–November 27 (Fri.), 2026
- Closed
- 2nd and 4th Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays
- Admission
- Free
About the Exhibition
Born in 1946, Tochihara is an artist based in Kobe, western Japan. She has maintained an active practice after graduating from Musashino Art University in Tokyo, exhibiting widely in solo and group shows both in Japan and internationally, and winning awards at numerous public exhibitions. Ever since she started painting in earnest in 1991, she has continued to explore love, peace, and other universal themes through vivid color schemes and bold expression. But the 1995 Kobe earthquake left a particularly profound impact on her practice, deeply infusing her work with themes of nature, the interconnection of life, and a yearning for hope and renewal for humankind.
“Tochihara Toshiko: Existence and Its Floating Outlines” takes a fresh look at Tochihara’s work—which has thus far taken inspiration from inquiries into war, human ego, and the violence embedded in society—alongside recent shifts in her thinking. While her earlier work is themed around anger and misery, her recent output increasingly pivots toward human connection, love, and the preciousness of each and every life.
In meditating on the world’s population and mounting mortality rate, Tochihara became acutely aware that an individual person is behind each one of those immense numbers. This realization prompted within her a sense of personal displacement, leaving her to feel untethered within a vast world—a sensation that carried over into the brushstrokes and composition of her recent paintings. With deliberately ambiguous and fluid expressions, they do not offer a fixed meaning or a completed image, but instead bring into relief the uncertainty of existing in the here and now.
Centered on her new body of work, this exhibition follows the shift in Tochihira’s thought and mode of expression. The inquiries into war and society marking her past work have not disappeared. But now, filtered through the themes of love and peace, they tie into more fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to live? We hope her new expressions offer visitors a space to appreciate the nuances of her brushwork and contemplate, from a fresh perspective, the existential themes they evoke.