Isaji Yugo, Ryota Kikuchi, Patrik Söderlund (IC-98)
▼OPENING RECEPTION
October 31 (Saturday), 2026 | 18:00–19:00
■Period
October 31st (Saturday), 2026 – December 26th (Saturday), 2026
Wednesdays through Saturdays, 13:00 - 18:00
(closed on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and National Holidays)
*temporary closure: Nov 11 - Dec 5
■Art Week Tokyo special schedule:
Nov 4, 2026–Nov 5, 2026 [VIP Days] Primarily by invitation
Nov 6, 2026–Nov 8, 2026 [Public Days] 10:00–18:00
□Organizer: Kana Kawanishi Art Office LLC
□Cooperation: Finnish Institute in Japan
■Venue
KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
4-7-6 Shirakawa, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0021 JAPAN
*car parking available in front of the gallery
left: Isaji Yugo, bottle [installation view] | 2025 | plastic bottle
center: Ryota Kikuchi, Ride on Time 2023 | 2023 | archival pigment print | 728 × 1091 mm
right: IC-98 and Suomi/Koivisto Architects, A Third of Life | 2025 | site-specific participatory installation | dimensions variable | photo by Maiju Suomi
all images: © the artists, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to present “Everyday, With a Delay,” a three-person exhibition featuring Isaji Yugo, Ryota Kikuchi, and Patrik Söderlund (IC-98), opening on Saturday, October 31, 2026.
In our daily lives, we understand the objects around us through their names and functions, moving through familiar surroundings without consciously registering the order that shapes them. Yet a slight change in an object’s form or the placement of a body can suddenly reveal an unfamiliar aspect of the world we take for granted. Beginning with such ordinary things and experiences as household objects, urban spaces, sleep, and dreams, this exhibition brings together three practices that unsettle our perception of the everyday.
* * *
 bottle2024 | plastic bottle | 250 × 80 × 80 mm | © Isaji Yugo, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, photo by Hako Hosokawa |  cutter2024 | box-cutter blade (stainless steel, welded) | 225 × 140 × 140 mm | © Isaji Yugo, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
|---|---|
 bowl2023 | ceramic, kintsugi (Japanese lacquer, gold powder) | 500 × 500 × 250 mm | © Isaji Yugo, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
Isaji Yugo transforms everyday manufactured objects—including ballpoint pens, plastic bottles, and utility knife blades—into sculptures by intervening in their materials and structures. We recognize what they are made of, yet cannot quite reconcile what we see with the objects we know. Drawing out the inherent properties of his materials, Isaji gently disrupts ways of seeing bound to familiar uses. His practice of “Pure Home-Based Street Art,” through which he intervenes in everyday life from his home studio, discovers the potential for departing from the known world within the things closest to hand.
* * *
 swing_uwajima2013 | archival pigment print | 728 × 1091 mm | © Ryota Kikuchi, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |  Ride on Time 20232023 | archival pigment print | 728 × 1091 mm | © Ryota Kikuchi, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
|---|---|
 60°2015 | archival pigment print | 728 × 1091 mm | © Ryota Kikuchi, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
Ryota Kikuchi draws on his bodily awareness as a free climber to make visible the territories and boundaries embedded in cities and landscapes. In photographs in which he “hooks” his body onto streetlights, signs, and monuments, the presence of a person where none is expected changes how we read the scene. Structures we might ordinarily pass without noticing become footholds and supports for a body, revealing how they govern the use of space and human behavior. With a sense of humor, these images draw our attention to the unspoken conventions that shape the city.
* * *
 A Third of LifeIC-98 and Suomi/Koivisto Architects | 2025 | site-specific participatory installation | dimensions variable | © the artists, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, photo by Maiju Suomi |  Memory and MatterIC-98 | 2025 | 2-channel unsynchronised UHD video installation | 33’56” + 32’52” | seamless loop, silent | film still | © the artists, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
|---|---|
 House of KhronosIC-98 | 2016– | long-duration environmental artwork (Pöytyä, Finland) | © the artists, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, photo by Vesa-Matti Väärä |
Based in Finland, Patrik Söderlund has explored relationships between humans and their environment, history, and time through his work under the collaborative name IC-98. A Third of Life, created by IC-98 in collaboration with Suomi/Koivisto Architects and conceived as a collective ritual of sleep and dreaming, presents the familiar act of sleeping as a space for reconsidering our relationships with others and our surroundings. By bringing together historical prints, images, and musical scores, he also establishes new connections between the times and meanings accumulated within objects of different origins. Moving between dreaming and waking, past and present, his practice opens up room to encounter the world before us differently.
* * *
A brief interval separates seeing something from understanding it. Within this “delay,” we become aware of what our habitual ways of seeing cannot fully grasp. Bringing these three distinct practices into dialogue, the exhibition invites visitors to encounter the moment when the everyday emerges, just a little later, as a world perceived anew.
Artist Profiles
Isaji Yugo
Isaji Yugo was born in 1985 in Gifu, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Tama Art University in 2008 and studied in Sweden as an overseas trainee of the Pola Art Foundation in 2019.
Selected solo exhibitions include “Purely Home-Made Street Art” (2024, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan), “Second Hand World” (2020, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo), and “rehabilitation” (2020, Gallery Bageriet, Gothenburg, Sweden). Selected group exhibitions include “In Place of You” (2022, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo), “Spinning East Asia Series II: A Net (Dis)entangled” (2022, Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile, Hong Kong), and “New works” (2017, The Drawing Room Gallery, Makati, Philippines). He was selected for “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2010” (2010) and “Arts Challenge 2015” (2014).
Ryota Kikuchi
Born in 1981 in Chiba, Japan, Ryota Kikuchi graduated in Intermedia Art from Tokyo University of the Arts and completed his MA in Intermedia Art at the same university. Translating his distinctive perspective as a free climber into artistic expression, he creates works that make visible the various territories and boundaries embedded in cities and landscapes.
Selected solo exhibitions include “Son-Kei” (2019, The Railway Museum, Saitama, Japan), “Respectablandscape” (2016, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo), “in and out” (2015, CC4441 THE GALLERY, Tokyo), and “Boo-ken” (2014, island MEDIUM, Tokyo). Selected group exhibitions and festivals include “The Secret of the Lake” (2023, Ichihara Lakeside Museum, Chiba, Japan), “Northern Alps Art Festival 2020–2021” (2021, Takagariyama Observatory, Nagano, Japan), “knowledgescape” (2018, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo), and “PLAY OUTSIDE!—From Picnic to Skateboarding” (2018, Ichihara Lakeside Museum, Chiba, Japan).
Patrik Söderlund (IC-98)
Born in Turku, Finland, in 1974, Patrik Söderlund lives and works in his hometown. He received a BA in Cultural History from the University of Turku in 2002 and co-founded the artist duo IC-98 with Visa Suonpää in 1998. Through animations combining drawing and digital techniques, alongside site-specific installations, his practice explores relationships between humans and nature, history and time.
Selected solo exhibitions as IC-98 include “Impivaara – A New World” (2024, Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland) and “Drawn into Tomorrow” (2015–2016, Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK). Group exhibitions and festivals include the Helsinki Biennial (2021, Finland) and “Collecting Europe” (2017, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK). IC-98 represented Finland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and received the Finnish State Art Prize in 2009.
>> 日本語PDF
>> English PDF