TAKURO TAMURA

Tamura often draws inspiration from everyday surroundings and frequently incorporates motifs related to transportation into his practice, such as asphalt, road signs, and traffic mirrors. With his keen observational skills, technical mastery, and playful sensibility, the artist recontextualizes familiar objects by detaching them from their original roles and settings, imbuing them with new significance.

The wall-mounted Lovers work, which forms the centerpiece of this exhibition, belongs to a series in which Tamura likens traffic mirrors to romantic partners. By removing these objects—originally installed to ensure road safety—from their usual context and transforming them into figures that seem to face one another, or turn away in silence, the artist humorously draws out the emotions and relationships latent within otherwise impersonal public fixtures. Previously developed as freestanding sculptures, the series now shifts to a mode of presentation in which the mirrors project outward from the wall, meeting the viewer’s gaze head-on while reflecting it more intimately together with the surrounding space.

Also on view are TORNCEPT-One Way #1 and TORNCEPT-One Way #wm2, in which one-way road signs—normally intended to indicate a clear and definite direction—are torn and twisted into objects that suggest uncertain destinations. The series gives form to the way something once simple can become fragmented, complicated, and branching. Its title, TORNCEPT, combines “torn” and “concept,” reflecting the artist’s attempt to affirm the very sensation of living in the present, where all kinds of concepts seem to grow increasingly diverse, complex, and ambiguous over time.

Meanwhile, Rediymade-The way HP7W+JFQ is a two-dimensional work that meticulously recreates an actual road Tamura encountered while walking, reproducing its scratches, dimensions, and materials as faithfully as possible. By bringing back to the surface of our awareness a scene that we may see in daily life yet rarely register, the artist invites us to rediscover its beauty and quiet intrigue. The title Rediymade derives from the structure of the series itself: fragments of roads, which already exist as readymade objects, are remade by hand using the same materials through a process of DIY.

Although the works in this exhibition originated from different circumstances, they each take public objects related to roads as their point of departure, reconsidering the landscapes we pass through unconsciously from unexpected perspectives. Expanding subtle moments of dissonance and discovery embedded in the familiar into absurd scales and forms, Tamura’s practice offers both a critical gaze toward contemporary society and a quiet sense of romance found within the everyday. We hope you will take this opportunity to experience the artist’s distinctive world.

*Please note the exhibition will be closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays, as well as Saturday, July 11 and Sunday, July 12.