A talk event is scheduled on Saturday, December 13, 3 pm –4 pm.

(Details regarding registration will be announced separately.)

YUKIKOMIZUTANI is pleased to present Akira Kugimachi: “Absentia – Timeless Landscape”, on view from Saturday, December 13, 2025 to Saturday, January 17, 2026.

Working from his studio in Paris, France, Kugimachi has consistently explored the theme of “landscape,” pursuing a painterly expression that contemplates the relationship between human beings and the world. His process begins by layering multiple coats of sumi ink onto a pitch-black surface, over which he repeatedly applies thin washes of gofun pigment dissolved in nikawa glue. This act resembles light emerging gradually from the void. He further interprets the wrinkles formed by momigami (kneaded paper)—sometimes as an abstract expanse of space, at other times as textures reminiscent of ancient cave walls.

What appears is a vision of uninhabited landscapes: desolate snow-clad mountains, sheer cliffs, clouds and mist drifting across silent terrains—scenes that transcend any sense of predetermined harmony. Perhaps it is only by contemplating the legacy of “absence” that we can reflect on where we are heading.

Kugimachi’s first solo exhibition at YUKIKOMIZUTANI will be presented as a retrospective, tracing his creative trajectory from early representative works to his most recent paintings.

Artist Statement

“Everything is repeated, and everything returns. Only that moment belongs to us.”
Andrei Tarkovsky cites this line from a poem by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, in Nostalgia. If we understand his words as suggesting that the existence of time is cyclical—pointing to the ephemerality of life and an eternal present—they resonate with the foundations of Eastern philosophy expressed by Daisetsu Suzuki and Kitaro Nishida: that the ceaseless ebb and flow of life and death ultimately constitutes eternal life, and that the absolute “now” is itself infinite time.

By depicting a world devoid of human or living traces—a “landscape of absence”—I wish to evoke scenes from before or after the era of humankind. This intention arose through encounters with overwhelming, even sublime landscapes during my fieldwork in places such as Italy, Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland. Why am I drawn to these primordial visions, stripped of plants, animals, or signs of human life? There was always an overwhelming sense of “absence.” Yet this perception exists only within my limited consciousness.

In reality, within the vast geological processes that shaped our planet, a barren landscape may once have held abundant flowing water (much like how we imagine Mars today), where animals roamed and human villages thrived. Or perhaps, after catastrophe, new life will emerge again tens of thousands of years into the future. The ability to imagine both past and future landscapes is a distinctly human trait.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, “The world began without the human race and will end without it.” By traveling through not only space but also time on a scale far beyond human measure, we may come to recognize ourselves as beings who continually arise and vanish within a great cyclical flow—drifting through a single fleeting moment. In doing so, we may find a way to contemplate the future that lies ahead.

Through expressing “presence within absence”—the vast cycle of life and death embedded in absence—as a timeless landscape situated in the eternal present that predates the division of subject and object, I hope to cast new light on our contemporary world, prompting reflection upon our civilization and our current position within it.
If viewers can perceive the presences hidden within absence and feel the landscape of time expanding there, nothing would make me happier.

Akira Kugimachi