The inner worlds we carry are shaped by everyday experiences, yet some fleeting moments rise above the ordinary, demanding attention. For seemingly inexplicable reasons, some of these ordinary everyday encounters are collected and etched into memory. Life is often passed by with downcast eyes until these small moments appear, picked up and carried along; they are placed in a small pocket of the mind and saved for later, for when a time arises for them to be skipped across a water’s surface, bouncing forward into new experiences shaped by the skipping stone that enabled them.
Skipping Stones draws from this same experience of observation, allowing a scene or object to remain as it is, without forcing a narrative, reason, or conclusion. This allows for reflection on how scenes are experienced, internalised, and later conceptualised after being encountered. The works in Skipping Stones participate in an ongoing artistic question: how images move between the world before us and the world carried within, with each encounter leaving its own small ripple.
In the works of Aya Higuchi (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) and Miho Ichise (b. 1969, Saitama, Japan), the beginnings of this internalisation process can be seen. Their paintings offer a quiet representation of life’s smallest (yet most pleasurable) moments: a slice of cake on a china plate, or the petrichor smell after a rainy day. Ichise focuses on fleeting joys, such as in Moonlit Town, where the serenity of the quiet night is made visible by filtered moonlight. Works by Koji Yamaguchi (b. 1982, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan) render universally recognisable scenes softened and blurred like memory, while they retain a vivid sensory presence through their subtle sense of movement.
Yuri Ando (b. 1998, Kanagawa, Japan) takes familiar surroundings into the realm of abstracted memory, drawing familiar daily scenes from this pocket of the mind and translating them to canvas. apartment complex leaves is inspired by a housing complex in Nakagami, Tokyo, where the artist used to live; although the complex was demolished as part of urban planning and no longer exists, the impression it left on Ando remains strong. Ando describes the space of a painting as “reacting to actual landscapes and symbolic shapes” until, through the process of this physical translation, “the actual landscape gradually blends into the space of the painting.” A memory skipped forward on the canvas, leaving subtle ripples of a transformed experience.
Kanji Hasegawa (b. 1990, Mie, Japan) uses everyday forms, both natural and industrial, floral and metallic, to create a wordless communication between objects and time. Hasegawa draws from the frameworks of sculpture and Zen as entry points, offering a way to see time spent and internalised in the new hybrid forms created. Here, the movement from an external world to an internal image begins, and the act of seeing becomes a vehicle for understanding. Chen Tianyi (b. 1996, Nanjing, China) extends this wordless communication into the nostalgic and fantastic, exploring the intersection of dream, memory, and reality across multi-media surfaces. These blurring boundaries between the fictive and real are further explored through the abstracted physical presence of works by BIEN (b. 1993, Hiroshima, Japan) and Ryu Takeda (b. 1989, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan). Across Skipping Stones, calm observations gradually shift toward blurred, fragmented, internalised images. Initial encounters soften into memory, and translated abstraction brings perception itself into focus. Each artwork offers a small daily experience, moments that have left subtle impressions on the artist and, by extension, the viewer; the skipping stones collected along the way.
