NAOKI KOIDE

Once positioned as the one being protected, the artist now finds himself in the role of a parent who must protect others. The desire to safeguard one’s child exists alongside moments that cannot be faced through individual effort alone. It is through these experiences of protection, responsibility, and uncertainty that Koide repeatedly returns to the image of the komainu. These paired guardian figures commonly found at Japanese temples and shrines. In Koide’s work, they are no longer merely traditional symbols, but are invested with familial projection, carrying sensations of protection, companionship, and shifting positions.

Within the exhibition space, pairs of komainu appear almost casually, lightly placed throughout the gallery as if waiting to be discovered. They may suddenly come into view around a corner, gentle and playful. Stripped of the solemn authority of traditional stone guardians and detached from any symbolic threshold, they take on an endearingly off-centered presence, tinged with humor. Their surfaces retain clear traces of making: pressed marks, subtle undulations of material, and textures that have not been fully smoothed away. This unfinished warmth gives the forms a tactile immediacy, allowing protection, prayer, and time to be quietly held within a hushed scale. In this way, the works both extend Koide’s existing sculptural language and open it toward renewed attentiveness.

During a recent residency in Jingdezhen, Koide’s experience with blue-and-white porcelain subtly echoed his earlier experiences with oil painting during his student years. Restrained pastel tones are gently laid across the canvas, never rushing to dominate the surface but leaving space to breathe through mutual restraint. Flattened grey fields intersect with subtly humorous figures, while finely rendered floral motifs introduce layered rhythms across the picture plane. The figures rest quietly side by side, forming gentle relationships in stillness.

Between sculptures and paintings, “Return” gradually emerges as a posture rooted in the present. In the exhibition, Squid Head stands silently, its vertically stacked form resembling both a tower and a ruin, imbued with the atmosphere of a fictional era—suggestive of history, yet resistant to alignment with any known past.

Themes of family no longer appear as imagery, but are translated into structural presence: quiet, stable, and enduring. Return, here, is not a retreat into memory, but a re-grounding after traversing the outside world, a way of standing again at the point of one’s own sensibility. Through humour and tenderness, Koide’s works gently counter the unease brought by shifting roles and the passage of time, allowing feelings of family, companionship, and love to be held, sustained, and carried forward.