Receiving Fragments

The Art to Live exhibition, Exploring III −Fragments of Art Born from Encounters−, was held on the first floor of the Osaka Metro Hommachi Building, located in Osaka’s business district. Directly connected to a subway station, the high-rise complex houses shops, offices, and a luxury hotel, and serves as a thoroughfare for large numbers of people each day. The venue, the first-floor entrance hall, is an open, glass-walled space facing Midosuji Avenue. Characterized by its bright atmosphere and abundant natural light, the hall offers a sense of transparency and accessibility. As tenants and visitors passed through the space, some encountered the exhibition unexpectedly, pausing to view the works. The decision to stage the exhibition in a commercial building situated in one of Osaka’s prime locations likely reflects the organizers’ desire to expand opportunities for encounter beyond dedicated art audiences, reaching those who come to the area as part of their everyday routines.
This exhibition forms part of a project that seeks to present outstanding works by artists with disabilities in a comprehensive manner, alongside the work of contemporary artists active today. In an age marked by the rapid improvement of advanced information technologies, we increasingly entrust our sense of security to the efficiencies offered by AI, and tend to distance ourselves from direct relationships between people and with our immediate surroundings. By sounding a note of caution against such tendencies, and by exhibiting works by artists with disabilities in juxtaposition with those of contemporary practitioners, this exhibition distinguishes itself from other contemporary art shows.
The exhibition was structured around three key themes: “Forms of Learning,” “Signs and Awareness,” and “Sensing Beings.” What struck me as particularly important was its refusal to reduce the works to interpretations based merely on “attributes” or “characteristics.” Rather than simplifying the artworks in this way, the exhibition foregrounded the contexts in which each artist creates, by engaging with the backgrounds of their practices and the various environments in which their work unfolds, including the home, school, and studio. It explored how the works emerge through these relationships and how they are subsequently received. In doing so, the exhibition sought to shed light on the process itself.
This perspective is also connected to the way the project situates itself within a continuity of time. Launched in 2019, the series has continued to renew its curatorial approach as it traverses different moments and venues. One senses the organizers’ determination to nurture its central questions and to keep thinking through them over time.

Works by nine artists were on view: Oe Masahiko, Katsunobu, Katsuyama Naoto, Saito Aya, Takada Mal, Nakane Kyoko, Hirata Yasuhiro, Matsumoto Kunizo, and Morimoto Eri. Guided by the keywords of each chapter, the works created a gentle rhythm within the space, an interplay between pieces that unfolded gradually as one moved through the exhibition.
Among the works presented under the theme “Signs and Awareness,” the photographs and video documenting Katsuyama’s creative process left a particularly strong impression. Katsuyama’s practice unfolds through a sequence of actions: he moistens the wallpaper of a room with his saliva and peels it away, using the traces left behind to create wall drawings; he then chews the stripped wallpaper like gum, shapes it, and throws it onto the ceiling, where it adheres. These records, which capture the site itself transforming into an installation, dissolved the boundary between artwork and archive. At the same time, they provided an essential point of entry into the context of his expression, allowing the viewer to grasp the process through which the work comes into being.
By contrast, Nakane Kyoko’s work consists of logos, barcodes, and other printed text cut from milk cartons with scissors and carefully arranged piece by piece inside a case. Because the fragments are not affixed, their overlapping configuration shifts from day to day. For this reason, it is through documentation by support staff and those around her that the act itself is brought into focus as a work. Amid the difficulty of preserving the form of an action, this practice offers a response to the question of how such expressions might be received and sustained over time.
While viewing these works, I was reminded of the four-panel comic Yū-mei (Famous) included in Kōji‑en by Aihara Koji¹. The story portrays a greengrocer’s wife who, though possessing the talent to make a Nobel Prize–level discovery were she to become a physicist, never encounters the opportunity to pursue that path and continues her life running the shop. When I first read this comic, it prompted me to reflect on the conditions necessary for talent to flourish, and on the uncertainty of encounters that might be described as chance. In this exhibition, the reason Katsuyama’s and Nakane’s actions came to be received as forms of expression surely lies in the sustained attention of supporters and those around them, who recognized and continued to look closely at their daily practices over time. I feel deep respect for that fact, and at the same time found myself imagining how many other forms of expression may exist that have not yet come to light.
It is only through the attentive gaze of those who earnestly observe these actions, document them together with the artists, and receive them with care that their expressions come to emerge as works of art. From this perspective, might these practices not also be understood as a form of collaboration, an approach to production in which the artist and those around them together shape the work as a shared act?

Drawing on my own past experience², I had long felt a certain hesitation about having an exhibition in which the expressions of people with disabilities are placed alongside the works of contemporary artists within the same space. One major reason lay in the question of how we understand the relationship between maker and work. Once situated within the environment of an exhibition, a work is viewed by many people; it can evoke not only subtle emotions and moments of inspiration, but at times even negative feelings. When an expression, having left the hands of its maker, enters the lives of viewers and becomes woven into their individual narratives, how does the maker receive that reality? This was the point that continued to trouble me. For that very reason, I always carried, deep within me, the question of whether a person with a disability fully understands and consents to the act of releasing their work into the world of their own will. Is being seen by many people truly a good thing for that individual? When an expression that emerged as an extension of an act that felt natural, or perhaps unavoidable, to the maker is presented as a “work” under the guidance of those around them, what does the maker feel, and how do they experience that transformation?
Such thoughts continued to circle in my mind. And yet, what stood before me in the exhibition space were expressions that unmistakably stirred the hearts of viewers. As many people encountered them, moments arose in which a range of emotions were brought into being. Might not that very fact possess the power to nudge the contours of what we call “art” slightly outward? Rather, I found myself feeling that we must be cautious about drawing boundary lines between the works of artists with disabilities and those of professional artists based solely on differences in background.

The word “boundary” carries a particular resonance for me. Ten years ago, at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, I organized Morimoto’s workshop Touching the Ambiguous Boundary (Line)—Grinding Sesame—. Participants were given nothing more than a mortar, a pestle, and whole sesame seeds, and asked simply to keep grinding. The seeds became ground sesame, and then gradually transformed into sesame paste. As one traced the process of change through sight, smell, and the sensation in the hands, the question arose: at what point, and where, does it become “something else”? The boundary is elusive. The seven colors of the rainbow, too, resist precise demarcation within their gradations. Even the names of certain fish change as they mature, though growth itself is continuous. This workshop, born from Morimoto’s seemingly simple question, appeared modest at first glance, yet it was profoundly layered, touching on the very foundations of how we perceive the world. Those participants who continued grinding for more than two hours must have clearly felt, in their hands, the moment when the resistance of the pestle suddenly grew lighter. It was a bodily realization of transition, more certain than explanation could ever be. To perceive the world, I came to feel, is not merely to rely on someone else’s words, but to grasp it through one’s own embodied experience. And perhaps, as I learned from Morimoto, a boundary is nothing more than a shifting awareness that trembles within relationships.

Human beings accumulate experience through their relationships with those around them, continually renewing their understanding through the senses and the body. The act of trying to know another’s practice is akin to walking alongside the course of their life. When the phrases “outstanding works by people with disabilities” and “the work of contemporary artists” are placed side by side, something like a boundary long embedded within society comes into view. Yet rather than allowing our gaze to be captured by that dividing line, I would prefer to listen closely to the emotions and thoughts that arise in the presence of the works themselves. What this project ultimately proposed, it seems to me, was a practice that acknowledges the existence of boundaries while continuing to unsettle them, sustaining a state in which those lines are kept in motion rather than fixed in place.
The word “fragments” in the exhibition’s title felt to me like small seeds handed over within that very state of fluctuation. How one chooses to nurture the seeds one has received is, perhaps, a question entrusted to each viewer. Even now, after leaving the exhibition behind, I find my thoughts drifting toward where they might take root and what they may yet become.

Footnotes

1. Aihara Koji, Kōji-en, 3rd ed. (Shogakukan, 1989), p.227. ↩

2. The author curated and organized the exhibition series Art Picnic at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History from 2011 to 2013. In 2011, with planning cooperation from Tanpopo-No-Ye Foundation, the exhibition introduced works by artists with physical, intellectual, and psychosocial disabilities. In 2012 and 2013, it presented works by contemporary artists, self-taught practitioners, and creators identified as having disabilities. ↩