Acquiring Words That Soften Boundaries

“It is extremely difficult to plan an exhibition that displays works by artists with disabilities alongside contemporary art.”
This is something I have constantly felt while working on exhibitions featuring art brut and outsider art, which include works by artists with disabilities. Seeing how effortlessly this exhibition overcame that challenge, I couldn’t help but let out a small hum of admiration.
The exhibition Exploring II - Fragments of Art in Everyday Life was organized by the Art to Live project, which was selected for Osaka Prefecture’s “project introducing contemporary art by artists with disabilities for EXPO 2025 (Osaka, Kansai, Japan).” This project is a collaborative effort between capacious and the Association for the Promotion of Contemporary Art in Japan (APCA | JAPAN) ¹. By leveraging their respective expertise, they aim to introduce works by artists with disabilities alongside contemporary artists, recognizing their artistic excellence and elevating their value within the context of contemporary art. This exhibition focused on small, everyday matters and challenges as essential themes worth capturing. Fourteen artists are featured under four themes: Beloved Things, Handiwork, Routine, and Beyond Words. The arrangement of works in the exhibition space placed artists with disabilities and contemporary artists in configurations that highlighted both their unique characteristics and the similarities they shared.

Particularly striking was the pairing of works by Hirata Yasuhiro and Morimoto Eri in the Routine section. Both artists share an obsessive engagement with repetitive acts and the circular forms that emerge from them.
Hirata has been creating art at Atelier Hiko in Hirano, Osaka since 1998, working there once a week. In Hirata’s cylindrical pieces, named Corn on The Cob after his favorite food, numerous nails are hammered into the interior of cardboard tubes. Initially, the heads of the nails on the outside of the tubes formed neat rows, but in recent years, Hirata has begun using different types of nails, hammering them in greater quantities, resulting in a surface covered in various circular patterns. When looking at the areas without nails, the colors and patterns arranged on the sides of the paper tubes, and the countless nails densely packed inside, it begins to resemble a living creature hiding dangerous features. Some pieces, having been hammered to the brink of structural collapse, develop eerie contours—an effect that feels almost organic, as though the tubes themselves possess a living quality.
On the other hand, Morimoto creates small circular patterns through more detailed and meticulous work. Her contour map series translates landscapes into dots of varying sizes and colors, and she carefully calculates the placement of each one, methodically applying them to the canvas. In her work, perfectly round circles, which seem almost impossible to have been created by a human hand, appear in vast numbers, varying in color and size. The accumulation of these dots generates an entirely different world, so far removed from the original landscape that it becomes unrecognizable as such. Morimoto’s working notes, alongside collections of minuscule paper fragments stored in glass jars, further attest to her commitment to an extreme level of precision and dedication, reflecting her meticulous approach to delving deeply into specific, intricate tasks.
While the processes through which Hirata and Morimoto create their circles differ significantly, both are fixated on tasks that might seem overwhelming to others. Despite experiencing some physical discomfort, they become so absorbed in their work that, in the end, they achieve mental tranquility. Although there may be varying degrees, this process is an aspect that can be seen equally in both artists with disabilities and contemporary artists. The harmony created by their resonance was evident in the exhibition space they shared.
This exhibition successfully created numerous moments of resonance like this. That is why, as I previously mentioned, I couldn’t help but express my admiration.

And yet, while I found myself feeling that a boundary still exists between works by artists with disabilities and contemporary art, it would be premature to resolve this by simply segregating them. When works by artists with disabilities are pushed outside the realm of art and categorized as something “other”, it is not because they lack value, but because we lack the words to properly discuss them.
If we wish to recognize new artistic value in works that have not yet been widely acknowledged, we must expand our vocabulary as much as possible. It is important to speak about it in the form of an exhibition, as in this case, and at the same time, we can also discuss its value from academic perspectives such as art history, anthropology, disability welfare studies, and medicine. ² Alternatively, critiques could also emerge from approaches in critical theory, minority studies, and gender studies, while discussing and selling in the market further contributes to enhancing the actual value of the artwork. By breaking free from the constraints of individual fields and creating cross-disciplinary language to discuss the artists and their work through various methods, we can finally present the value of the artwork with compelling persuasion. Unfortunately, even I must admit that I have yet to fully acquire the words necessary to do so.
To loosen the firmly drawn boundaries before us, we must accumulate more and more words—even if just one at a time. This exhibition embodied that effort with ease.

Footnotes

1. Capacious is under the jurisdiction of the Osaka Prefectural Welfare Department and, as a commissioned project by Osaka Prefecture, it introduces works by people with disabilities in a wide range of forms, including artwork sales. In addition, the Association for the Promotion of Contemporary Art in Japan (APCA | JAPAN) has been running contemporary art fairs such as ART OSAKA for many years. For more details, see: https://www.capacious.jp/about ; https://apca-japan.org (Both last accessed: March 9, 2025) ↩

2. In Europe and the United States, research specialists support this field. For example, Valérie Rousseau, the head of the curatorial department and senior curator at the American Folk Art Museum, who is also a leading figure in the field, earned two masters in anthropology and art theory, and a Ph.D. in art history. She not only organizes exhibitions at her museum but also engages in a variety of related activities and initiatives. Recently, she also conducted interviews with KAWS for the exhibition The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection (The Drawing Center, NY, 2024-2025), which features works including his collection of self-taught art. For more details, see: https://drawingcenter.org/posts/kaws-interview-valerierousseau (Last accessed: March 10, 2025) ↩