yasutake iwana, animal remains

Yasutake Iwana, "Drawings-Animal Remains"

January 24th - February 28th, 2026
taguchi fine art, tokyo

Taguchi Fine Art is pleased to announce the sixth solo show by a Japanese painter, Yasutake Iwana during above period.

Yasutake Iwana was born in 1987 in Mie prefecture. After his graduation from the painting course of Seian University of Art and Design in Kyoto in 2010, he stayed in Germany, studying at Art Academy in Duesseldorf as a guest student until 2012. He won the second prize at Art Award Tokyo in 2010, the first Mie TV Grand Prize in 2016, and the 19th Mie Prefecture Culture Award for New Artist in 2020. Currently living and working in his hometown, Shimagahara village in Mie. He has had a number of solo exhibitions at galleries in Osaka and Tokyo, and has had increasing opportunities to exhibit his works at museums, including "New-wave Artists in Mie" at Mie Prefectural Art Museum in 2015, "Aomori EARTH 2019" at Aomori Museum of Art in 2019, and "#StayMuseum" at Mie Prefectural Art Museum in 2020.

He is a founding representative of the art group, "Mitsunoki (tree with sap)" in Shimagahara village organized in 2013 and is leading various activities deeply rooted in its local history, climate and culture. Recently this group is really noticed as an example of Art-Collective and Localism in contemporary art. In 2024, he formed "E-ko" with artists from across Japan. This initiative began incorporating the concept of a ko - a traditional Japanese religious group - into an Art-Collective. He also initiated a collaborative project with employees at a local composting plant, creating a Òcompost muralÓ that has garnered significant attention beyond the local community.

His paintings are created in this activity, of which motifs are the nature and the religion in the village. In many case he starts the work from concrete objects around him, they are, however, highly abstract and really sophisticated.

On this occasion, installed are his recent drawings. They provide a clear indication of the fundamental ideas underlying Iwanami's oil paintings as revealed in his previous exhibitions, and this marks the first occasion they have been displayed collectively.

From 17:00 through 19:00 on Saturday, February 21st, we will have a reception for the artist. Looking forward to your visit.

Statements by the artist

"The years of depopulation have reduced the number of people, transforming the pilgrimage mountain into a dark forest where no one can enter. The field Buddha, its head broken by tree roots and beasts, sinks quietly into the earth. It seems we've reached the point where even passing down tales of our small village to the next generation has become difficult. Yet, when new year came, someone had placed a small rice cake at the edge of the forest."
from working notebook

The fragility of those depopulated areas, where even recounting memories has grown difficult, somehow resembles drawings drawn in charcoal or pastel on sun-faded paper. I had rarely made drawings as preparatory studies for oil paintings before.
Around the time the pandemic subsided, I began to make drawings on paper based on oil paintings I had either started or completed. It is also the possibility of other paintings lost in the process of layering pigments, and the emergence of form and color revealed through these drawings leads to the development of the next painting.
Some of the oil paintings I created in the village will never return to my studio once they leave, but in order to remember what happened here and my own paintings, with materials different from oil paints, I repeatedly record fragments of time onto paper.

2026, Yasutake Iwana