YUKIHISA ISOBE, TETSUO MIZÙ

Drawing on six decades of combined artistic production, the exhibition stages a dialogue between two practices united by a shared impulse: the desire to mark what is at risk of disappearing. Isobe, a pivotal figure in Japan’s postwar avant-garde, first gained recognition for his Wappen series (1961-65): repeated heraldic symbols rendered in stone dust and embossed fresco textures. He subsequently spent two decades as a practising ecological planner before returning to art through monumental land-art installations that render invisible environmental histories visible. Mizù, celebrated across Europe and Asia for his luminous paintings derived from international maritime signal flags, encoded personal memory and longing within geometric abstraction. Though their methods diverge—one forensic, the other lyric—both artists devoted their careers to the act of tracing: inscribing presence where absence threatens.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.” Traces takes this proposition as its point of departure, arguing that the cartographic and the chromatic are not opposed but complementary modes of summoning nearness from distance. Together, Isobe and Mizù describe the full arc of what it means to register experience: outward, toward the forces that shape our environment; inward, toward the feelings that shape our inner life. The exhibition asks us to look closely at what remains—and to consider what, without the artist’s hand, might have vanished without record.