2022.9.10 – 9.24
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday Sponsored by Ken Kagami, Cafe Sunday, uruotte, Utrecht
Special thanks : Hikotaro Kanehira
Travel agent : JTB
Media sponsor: Contemporary Art Library
Initiated by Jeffrey and Misako Rosen, COBRA

We are participating “Onsen confidential 2022”

What is Onsen Confidential?
Onsen Confidential is a hybrid city-wide gallery share and natural hot spring retreat/conference. The project is meant to bring together like-minded gallerists in a spirit of collaboration and cooperation and to provide a friendly introduction to the unique context of the contemporary art world of Tokyo.

Initiated by Misako & Jeffrey Rosen of Misako & Rosen, Tokyo and COBRA of XYZ Collective, Tokyo

We are pleased to host Good Weather from Chicago, USA, and A THOUSAND PLATEAUS ART SPACE from Chengdu, China. The participating artists of our show are Dylan Spaysky, Inga Danysz, Chen Qiulin, and Tadasuke Iwanaga.

We look forward to seeing you.

2022.07.30 – 09.03
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday
Also closed between 16th – 20th Aug. for summer holiday
Cooperation: Rossi & Rossi

We are pleased to announce the group show of the four artists: Kesang LAMDARK, Tsherin SHERPA, Tenzing RIGDOL, Nortse.

Kesang LAMDARK was born in 1963 in Dharamsala, India, Lamdark grew up in Switzerland where he later apprenticed and worked as an interior architect. He went on to study at Parsons New School for Design in New York, and he achieved an MA in Visual Art at Columbia University. The artist lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Lamdark’s plastic sculptures and mirrored light boxes are evidence of his displaced and multicultural upbringing. His search for an appropriate cultural space ultimately turned inwards and he came to understand and reconnect with his Tibetan heritage while living in the West. Lamdark’s Tibetan-Western identity lies in his ability to understand and find a balance between both cultures. Combining unusual materials, from hair to plastic, beer cans to nail polish, Lamdark’s life and works bring together the unfamiliar and revel in recycling everyday objects into works of art.

Tsherin SHERPA was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1968, Sherpa currently works between California and Kathmandu. When he was twelve years old, he began studying traditional Tibetan thangka painting with his father, Master Urgen Dorje Sherpa, a renowned thangka artist from Ngyalam, Tibet. After studying computer science and Mandarin in Taiwan, he returned to Nepal, where he collaborated with his father on several important projects, including thangka and monastery mural paintings. In 1998, Sherpa immigrated to California; there, he began to explore his own style – reimagining traditional tantric motifs, symbols, colours and gestures, which he resolutely placed in contemporary compositions.
The artist represented Nepal at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with his solo exhibition Tales of Muted Spirits – Dispersed Threads – Twisted Shangri-La.

Tenzing RIGDOL was born in 1982 in Kathmandu, Nepal, Rigdol and his family were granted political asylum in the USA in 2002. Rigdol is a contemporary Tibetan artist whose work ranges from painting, sculpture, drawing and collage, to digital, video-installation, performance art and site specific pieces. His paintings are the products of collective influences and interpretations of age-old traditions; they are influenced by philosophy; often capture the ongoing issues of human conflicts; and have strong political undertones – for him, politics is an unavoidable element in his art. Indeed, in recent years Rigdol has become a focus for young Tibetan diaspora precisely because of the political nature of his art. He has been widely exhibited internationally and his artworks are included in public and private collections around the world. In 2011 his widely reported Our Land, Our People involved the covert transportation of 20 tonnes of soil out of Tibet, through Nepal, to Dharamsala. There, displaced Tibetans were given the opportunity to walk on their home soil once again. The journey to smuggle soil across three borders is documented in Bringing Tibet Home, a documentary directed by Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, which was awarded the Young European Jury Award (Prix du Jury de Junes Européens) at the 27th edition of FIPA (Interna tional Festival of Audiovisual Programmes. In 2014, Rigdol became one of the only two contemporary Tibetan artists to be included in the exhibition Tibet and India: New Beginnings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work Pin Drop Silence: Eleven-Headed Avalokitesvara was also the first work by a contemporary Tibetan artist to be acquired by the Met.

Nortse was born Norbu Tsering in 1963 in Lhasa, and has studied at various schools, including Tibet University in Lhasa, the Central Arts Academy in Beijing and art academies in Guangzhou and Tianjing. Since the mid-1980s, Nortse has been moving between a diversity of mediums – photography, performance, painting, installation and ready-made multimedia compositions and sculpture. The experience the artist amassed resulted in his creation of striking mixed-media works that experiment with forms and imagery from traditional art and culture. His subjects range from landscapes to (self) portraits, from claustrophobic interiors and expansive horizons, from the sacred to the profane. The works of Nortse address universal concerns through a tightly focused Lhasa (Nortse’s home) lens: global warming, environmental degradation, overpopulation, alcoholism among the youth, the erosion of culture and tradition, and the desire to establish one’s own identity in a world of mass media. Given the recent history of Tibet, the artist addresses these issues with an added urgency and poignancy.

Satoko Oe Contemporary

2022.05.17 – 06.11
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday

We are pleased to announce the 2 artists show of Yoshinori NIWA (b.1982) based in Vienna, and Naoya HIRATA (b.1991).

Many of Niwa Yoshinori’s works take the form of social interventions spanning diverse media, including performance, film, installations, and projects that progress during the exhibition. The clearly stated titles of works are slogan-like and self-explanatory, and in most cases, the entire process of carrying out unproductive and meaningless actions in public spaces is documented on film. By exposing various disturbances generated in the course of putting the work’s title into practice, the artist has revealed the boundaries and limitations of the “public” concept in numerous projects in Japan and abroad. In 2016 Niwa moved his base of operations to the Austrian capital of Vienna, and has been focusing on the social functions of visual media.

Dealing with the themes of space, time, and physicality, Naoya Hirata employs preexisting 3D models and images, which he has collected from the Internet, and using an assemblage method, he presents actual projections of sculptural works that were constructed in virtual computer spaces. By manifesting other realities, which are part of a new order, through virtual images, Hirata examines the relationship between real things by creating different versions of a plausible world while at the time offering contemporary interpretations of sculpture history.

Hirata quickly moves back and forth between the real and the virtual, enabling us to enjoy the myriad qualities of each state. The projected works are marked by disparate features: some are photographs, others are three-dimensional sculptures made with a 3D printer, and still others are images. These sculptural works, which dwell in a virtual space, are projected in the real world.

Satoko Oe Contemporary

2022.2.26 – 3.26
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday

Satoko Oe Contemporary

2021.9.25 – 10.23
Opening hour:12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday


Dealing with the themes of space, time, and physicality, Naoya Hirata employs preexisting 3D models and images, which he has collected from the Internet, and using an assemblage
method, he presents actual projections of sculptural works that were constructed in virtual computer
spaces. By manifesting other realities, which are part of a new order, through virtual images, Hirata
examines the relationship between real things by creating different versions of a plausible world while
at the time offering contemporary interpretations of sculpture history.

Hirata quickly moves back and forth between the real and the virtual, enabling us to enjoy the myriad
qualities of each state. The projected works are marked by disparate features: some are photographs,
others are three-dimensional sculptures made with a 3D printer, and still others are images.
These sculptural works, which dwell in a virtual space, are projected in the real world.

The title of the exhibition, Against Nature, is derived from an eponymous 1884 novel by the French
writer Joris-Karl Huysmans that was translated into Japanese by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko.
The story centers on Jean Des Esseintes, the descendent of a noble family, who shuts himself away
in a house in the suburbs, and while living a secret life, creates an artificial paradise inside his room.

We hope that you will take this opportunity to catch a glimpse of this artificial paradise created by Hirata.

Satoko Oe Contemporary

24 July – 7 August, 2021
24 August – 4 September, 2021
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Summer holiday: 8 – 23 August
Closed on Sunday, Monday, and National holiday
No opening reception will be held.


We are pleased to announce the summer show showing the fictional documentary film work “The Communities We Must Have Imagined” included in the solo show of Yoshinori NIWA in 2019, and the works by IKEZAKI Takuya, Kesang LAMDARK, Naoya HIRATA, Shigeru HASEGAWA, and Makiko MASUTANI. We look forward to welcoming you soon.

Satoko Oe Contemporary

2021.06.01 – 07.03
Opening hour: 12.00-18.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday

When you hear the title The Sower, are you reminded of Millet’s painting of that name, or one of the many Van Gogh works that share the same title? Or do you think of a picture by a different artist? Although you might not have actually seen the painting, The Sower is a very well-known title.

When asked why he chose The Sower, a subject addressed by many artists, as the title of this exhibition, Shigeru Hasegawa replied, “I just wanted to quote a painting that everybody knew very well.” It might well have been something else, like Sunflowers or The Scream, but since Hasegawa lived in Holland for a long time and painted lots of flowers and fruits, he thought The Sower was not totally unrelated.

“It’s not as if I want to express a certain thing with my paintings, or that there was a beautiful landscape or diva that I wanted to paint. I just want to paint pictures. To make my pictures, I have long taken an experimental approach in which I extract, dismantle, and reassemble motifs used in masterpieces from every age and region that I remembered being emotionally affected by, and then apply my own method of painting. For example, if I wanted to paint vegetables, I create a link to Arcimboldo or Jakuchu. If I wanted to paint curtains, I could do the same with Dutch interior paintings, or if wanted to paint a chair, I could create a link to Van Gogh. Except when I paint these things, a fish is not a fish, and an apple is not an apple. If might sound like some kind of Zen koan, but everything is just there because I wanted to paint a picture.”

As the novel coronavirus began to rage, and the world fell silent and became shrouded in despair, I imagined that like a sower, every artist was moving their brush while imagining a day when people might have a chance to see the pictures they were making. The pleasure of imagining the movement of a brush, listening closely to a sound, and coming face to face with a painting is akin to the Barbizon painters’ attempts to convey the “pleasures of life” by depicting the everyday activities of farmers. In the present age, however, this is an “ordinary miracle.” For me, it is important to remember that the pleasure of running a gallery is to enable as many people as possible to experience this kind of ordinary miracle.

2020.2.24 – 03.20
opening hour : 12.00-18.00
closed on 4th, and 5th Mar.
Closed on Sun, Mon, National holiday


We are pleased to announce the 3 artists show of Shigeru HASEGAWA (b.1963), imaginary Argentine artist, Luca COSTA (b.1989) and newly introducing virtual sculptor, Naoya HIRATA (b.1991).

Shigeru HASEGAWA shows his 3m dog painting painted in 1997. Luca COSTA will make an installation combining the new and previous works. Naoya HIRATA will show his virtual sculptures meant to be shown at Art Collaboration Kyoto. We look forward to welcoming you.

Satoko Oe Contemporary

31 October – 28 November, 2020
Opening hours: 12.00-19.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, and National Holiday

We are pleased to announce the solo show of Mitsuhiro IKEDA ” dawn ” at the above period.

The work of Mitsuhiro Ikeda (b.1978) involves carefully planning out complex and inexplicable perceptual architectures and experiences and painting them in numerous layers. Each landscape is not simply a record of a place, but structurally resembles a novel imbued with the memory of a place, a tale spun through the intricate intertwining of motifs, paint, and subject matter. Scattered fragments of paint converge, fragmentarily remembered scenes are selected, and the painting completed as if skimming the top layer of a concoction. While foreseeing the ways in which things develop, he sometimes pauses to observe phenomena, at other times is swept along by the unrestrained dynamism of the paint, eventually seeking out and guiding the work to its conclusion. Each ending leads to a new beginning, with a fresh canvas and a new tale to tell. He maintains faith that endlessly repeated acts will accumulate to give the works their richness.

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Light shines in, and images of objects and phenomena vaguely emerge. The outlines of shapes appear gradually, like mere premonitions, then melt into slumber again. In the outlines that coalesce and dissolve again and again, images take shape. Storytelling, imagining, thought, and more––are all processes that begin in this state between sleep and awakening. Rather than immediately rendering the contours of things clearly, I let my gaze linger on an undifferentiated mass of things, separating them out one by one and weaving them together in slumber. This process is not one of assigning or capturing definite shapes of things, but of distributing possible states of being throughout spaces.
Mitsuhiro IKEDA
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The exhibition title dawn refers to the time when the sky grows light, but also has other meanings including “beginning” and “premonition.” At a time when the way forward is so uncertain, we will be delighted if this exhibition heralds new beginnings, like the creation stories of mythology, and sheds new light on the future. The gallery plans to present four to six new works, with a new work entitled dawn (like the exhibition as a whole) as a centerpiece. We look forward to welcoming you at the exhibition.

5 September – 3 October, 2020
Opening hours: 12.00-19.00
Closed on Sun, Mon, and National Holiday

We are pleased to announce the solo show of Shinichiro KANO “logs” at the above period.
Interview with Shinichiro KANO