Selection

• Period: July 5 (Sat)–August 2 (Sat), 2025
• Artists: Mihoko Ogaki, Nanae Mitobe, Jörgen Axelvall
• Hours: Tue–Sat, 15:00-21:00
• Closed: Sun, Mon

KEN NAKAHASHI will present works by three artists—Mihoko Ogaki, Nanae Mitobe, and Jörgen Axelvall—from Saturday, July 5 to Saturday, August 2, 2025, as the second installment of the Selection exhibition. The gallery will be open only during the hours when dusk transitions into night, enabling visitors to experience the works under changing light conditions.

Mihoko Ogaki’s Milky Way is a three-dimensional installation in which light shines through countless small holes drilled into a fiber-reinforced plastic sculpture modeled on the human body. After experiencing a subarachnoid hemorrhage in 2013, the artist began to engage with themes of mortality and aging. The viewing experience seems to echo the viewer’s bodily awareness and inner state, gradually expanding beyond the realm of personal memory and emotion into a sense of connection with a universal human consciousness.

Mihoko Ogaki was born in Toyama in 1973 and currently lives in Ibaraki. After graduating from Aichi University of the Arts, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany from 1996. After working in Germany for about 16 years, returned to Japan in 2010. Ogaki presents installations exploring light, the body, and memory, both in Japan and internationally. Her major exhibitions include Milky Way—a wave of humanity (kenakian, 2022), Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival Project 2022 (Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, 2022), Milky Way – before the beginning – after the end 2021 (Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, 2021), The Human Body as a Microcosmos: Art, Anatomy and Astrology, (Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, 2019), and project N 54 (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2013).

Nanae Mitobe will present new paintings created for this exhibition. The works’ surfaces, on which the materiality of the paint, color, and time converge and crystallize, act on the viewer’s senses while radiating a glow like fleeting light illuminating the sky on a summer evening.

Nanae Mitobe was born in Kanagawa, is a rising young artist who has garnered high acclaim both in Japan and abroad. After completing her graduate studies at Tokyo University of the Arts, she also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently based in both Japan and Austria. Mitobe is known for her distinctive, sculptural painting style in which she applies thick layers of oil paint by hand, and for her series that explore themes such as society, music, and capitalism. In recent years, she has held several solo exhibitions, including Sin-In at agnès b. galerie boutique in 2023, and WHAT COLOR DO YOU SEE? at THE LOOP GALLERY. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition titled People Have The Power at DIESEL ART GALLERY, featuring works centered on social change and the power of the individual. That same year, she participated in the two-person exhibition Love Dream with Kazuhito Kawai at KEN NAKAHASHI, where both artists explored the themes of "dream" and "love" through their distinct approaches. In 2025, she held a solo exhibition at Art Front Gallery focused on the Korean Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement, where her restrained use of color drew significant attention as a new direction in her practice.

Jörgen Axelvall will exhibit a work from his early Go to become series. Resonating with the poetry of Mutsuo Takahashi, the work evokes a tranquil world shaped by the interweaving of words and images. Originally exhibited as a photographic print on traditional photo paper, it will be shown here in a new version printed on washi paper, a material Axelvall has been exploring in recent years.

Jörgen Axelvall was born in Sweden in 1972. After spending 15 years working in New York, he has been based in Tokyo since 2011. In recent years, he has expanded the scope of his artistic practice through exhibitions both in Japan and abroad, as well as through collaborations across various disciplines. In 2023, he participated in the Matsumoto Architecture + Art Festival, and in 2024, he held a solo exhibition Most likely, the flames will destroy themselves at KEN NAKAHASHI, which was later presented as a second phase at LOWW. He also took part in the two-person exhibition Pairspective 002: Cosmos with Yurina Okada, and the group exhibition Bad Romance in Taiwan. His 2022 monograph Looking Up explores the interplay of poetry and sound, and he continues to collaborate with poet Mutsuo Takahashi and various accomplished sound artists. Through works that explore solitude, memory, history, and humanity’s current spiritual and social condition (or the state of our world), he pursues a singular mode of expression in which photography, poetry, and sound intersect.