Catalog: Commemorating the 1st “MIMOCA EYE” Grand-prize Winner Akane Saijo - Double Touch

This is the catalogue for the special exhibition Commemorating the 1st “MIMOCA EYE” Grand-prize Winner Akane Saijo - Double Touch, held from 26 January 2025 to  30 March 2025.

Exhibition Overview

The public entry exhibition “MIMOCA EYE” began in 2022 as a venue for young artists to showcase their unique talents. We are pleased to present a solo exhibition of Akane Saijo (1989–), grand-prize winner in the 1st “MIMOCA EYE” exhibition. Saijo creates organically shaped clay sculptures, using them to produce moments when viewers grow viscerally aware of their own and other people’s bodies. Struck by how pottery’s hollows resemble the hollow spaces in the human body, she in recent years has created works suggestive of the body and its organs and held performances of blowing breath and sound into their hollows, seeking in this way to extend her body and the bodies of other performers. Hoping to examine more deeply the boundary between artwork and body, this exhibition will additionally feature glass works produced through a process of blowing air into their interior. Making ceramics means touching the clay with hands, shaping it with hand movements, and leaving hand marks on its surface. Hence, Saijo views ceramics as an act of becoming viscerally aware of her own body and a practice of communicating with the world. In performances, she has newly introduced the act of transport to explore the kinds of communication possible between the artwork and the body, between the interacting bodies of people lifting and carrying, and their bodies and the physical surroundings.

Language: Japanese and English (bilingual)
Pages: 96 pages
Dimensions: 25.6 × 18.4 cm

Texts：Akane Saijo,Hirokazu Tokuyama,Madoka Matumura
Translation：Christopher Stephens（pp.73,79,87-89),
Amstutz Communications（p.77),
Darryl Jingwen Wee（pp.82-84),
Photo：Takeru Koroda（pp.1-72,94_1,94_4,5),Keizou Kioku（pp.78-79),
Masahiro Yamamoto（p.94_2)
Photo courtesy：ARTCOURT Gallery（p.94_1,p.95_4,5),
LOCO GALLERY（p.94_2)
Design：Yuri Suyama
Printing and Binding：LIVE Art Books Inc.
Publishers：Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art,
The MIMOCA Foundation 2025