MAJIMA NAOKO

Born in 1944, Majima Naoko has spent more than five decades producing a diverse body of work encompassing pencil drawings, objects, and oil paintings. Her drawings are created by laying large sheets of paper on the floor and, putting her full body weight into the process, allows physical sensation to guide her as though becoming one with the paper. Organic forms proliferate like living cells across the entire surface, filling the picture plane with pulsating energy. These dense, undulating networks of light and dark lines reappear in her objects as masses of thread and fabric, merging with the glossy viscosity of adhesive to take on three-dimensional form.

Majima’s highly distinctive visual language has earned widespread recognition both in Japan and abroad, with major solo exhibitions at the Nagoya City Art Museum and the Ashikaga Museum of Art in 2018.

Composed primarily of new sculptural works, this exhibition brings together a range of materials drawn from the artist’s personal world: animal bones collected by a friend at the foot of Mount Fuji, prizes from traditional Japanese penny candy, driftwood gathered in France, the feathers of a single bird, weaving threads left by her late mother, who was a textile weaver, fragments of her own clothing, and even a chair from her studio. Through Majima’s hands, these everyday remnants are transformed into evocative new forms.

For Majima, “chimimōryō” refers to formless beings, like spirits that dwell in the wind, water, forests, stones, and rivers. While these evoke the idea of animism, she describes them less as mythical creatures than as real presences she can genuinely sense: entities that are “truly there” and that quietly “exist alongside” her through life.

Reflecting on moments of hardship and loneliness, when she felt as though she were the only person left in the world, Majima recalls that there were always serendipitous encounters with others, and unexplained forces that supported her. Created from objects intimately connecting to her own daily life, these works seem to offer thanks to the chimimōryō, imbued with a quiet yet unmistakable sense of celebration.

This marks Majima’s first solo exhibition at Mizuma Art Gallery in fourteen years, following her 2012 solo exhibition Fey. Alongside new sculptural works, the exhibition will feature previously unseen drawings from the 1990s and a reconfigured presentation of a koi sculpture from the same period, brought together as a single installation.

“I want to create beautiful things that feel mysterious and precarious, works that exist on the very verge of collapse. I want to be at the mercy of what I have made.”

We hope you will take this opportunity to encounter the artist’s work as it exists today.