NowHere Gallery’s Final Exhibition of the Year

Maiko Kikuchi: Pink Bunny

Thursday, October 24 - November 24, 2024

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 24 from 6:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m.

NowHere – 40 Wooster Street (between Grand and Broome Streets)

Admission: Free

NowHere Gallery hosts Pink Bunny, the upcoming solo exhibition by artist Maiko Kikuchi. The gallery’s final exhibition of the year, it runs from October 24 through November 24, 2024.

Maiko Kikuchi Pink Bunny

Waking Dreams

The unconscious is the wellspring of art. Ideas, some fully formed and some tantalizingly amorphous, bubble up from the dark ocean in our minds, all the time. It takes the artistic temperament to recognize, hone, and express the ones that cry out for it the most.

Dreams, perhaps the purest utterances of unconscious thought, have long been gifts to artists. From Renaissance stalwarts such as Raphael to 19th-century visionaries such as William Blake; surrealist mainstays such as Magritte to contemporary masters such as James Turrell, the fertile ground of the dreamscape has been a constant renewable resource for the creative act.

But what about daydreams? That sunlight cousin to the nightly dream, the daydream is equally capable of offering us jolts of inspiration, staggering us with unexpected juxtapositions, and equipping us with the tools to say what our unconscious is compelling us to say. The filmmaker David Lynch has long been proselytizing about the enormous potential daydreaming has for informing art. He has described it as a place where “all the thoughts just flow.”

But there is an essential difference between the daydream and the sleeping dream: One can be controlled and directed, at least to some degree, by the conscious mind, while the other holds us in its thrall and takes us wherever the id wishes to go. We can get lost inside a reverie, but we always have the power to change its course, adjust its focus, or hasten its pace. In this hybrid space between wakefulness and sleep, the artist might find incredible opportunities to enhance their work.

Maiko Kikuchi is an artist who has made harnessing her daydreams a central element of her practice. Her unique upbringing as the daughter of a practicing psychoanalyst in Japan gave her a deep and embedded understanding of the value of daydreaming, and her work—from paintings to collages to puppet-making to performance—relies on her ability to navigate and interpret the riddles offered to her by daydreams. By embracing dream logic and the twists of representation and narrative gifted to the artist by her subconscious, Kikuchi presents her audience with heavily personal art that’s riddled with archetypal imagery and moments. To briefly live inside her daydreams doesn’t only give us insight into her mind—it also invites us to look more closely at our own.

In addition to the exhibition, NowHere is hosting a series of live performances by Kikuchi on weekends throughout November. Register for the opening reception and choose a performance date at NowHere’s Eventbrite page. For more information about the exhibition, please visit the gallery’s website.

Maiko Kikuchi

About Maiko Kikuchi

Maiko Kikuchi was influenced by her psychoanalyst father, becoming interested in the boundary between dreams and reality at a young age. When she was still little, she started creating art based on the idea of making “visible daydreams.” She received her B.A. in Theater Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University in 2008, and she moved to the United States soon after to study fine art, receiving an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. Her desire to broaden the expression of her daydreams led her to expand her practice to the theatre field in 2013.

As a visual artist, her work has been shown in an online solo exhibition entitled Daydreaming Monologist and the online group exhibition Finding Sanctuary, which was presented by Visionary Art Collective. Kikuchi’s other group exhibitions include shows at Ca’d’Oro Gallery (New York), Parasol Project (New York), HERE Art Center (New York), Jamestown Art Center (Rhode Island), J-Collabo (New York), and more.

Kikuchi also works in creative collaborations with various partners, making animations for musicians, theatre companies, and cultural organizations nationwide. She is currently a board member of The Jim Henson Foundation.

About NowHere

NowHere is a multipurpose hub for New York City-based Japanese creators from across all disciplines. The gallery exists to help emerging talent explore their maximum potential by providing them with the means to showcase their practice and expand their network. Just like the artists they serve, they emigrated to New York because this city is endlessly inspiring. By facilitating new art from a Japanese perspective, NowHere hopes to offer inspiration to New York in turn. Their mission is accomplished anew each time they are able to excite New York audiences with fresh energy and points of view.

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NowHere Gallery to Exhibit Works by Yoichiro Yoda

Yoichiro Yoda: The Crossing

Thursday, July 27 through Sunday, August 27

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 27 from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.

NowHere – 40 Wooster Street (between Grand and Broome Streets)

Admission: Free

SoHo gallery NowHere will host the exhibition The Crossing with recent artworks by New York-based Japanese painter Yoichiro Yoda.

Artist Yoichiro Yoda

About the Artist

Born in Kagawa, Japan, and raised in New York City, Yoichiro Yoda is an artist who is driven by fixations and obsessions. Like a storyteller of mythic tales, he has created an entire cosmology from the topics, places, and people that prey on his mind. This pantheon includes everything from old movie palaces to the stately days of luxury sea travel to George Washington and his legendary deeds to a young woman Yoda met once at a theater years ago. By deploying these things across his paintings—by bringing them to life—Yoda shows us the topology of a world of his own creation.

The Long Room (Fraunces Tavern) by Yoichiro Yoda

Compressing History

In Yoda’s reality, history is compressed, manipulated, and adorned. The eras of silent films and the Revolutionary War live side-by-side here, connected at first by the tenuous fibers of simply being paintings by the same artist. But as we see the work all together, we find common thematic concerns. Nostalgia, for one thing, is prominent. But it’s an uncanny sort of nostalgia in which things feel slightly off, misremembered, or interpreted to the point of being just strange enough that mere sentimentality, a pitfall of much nostalgia, is left behind.

Unique Sense of Humor

Yoichiro Yoda, in some ways, lives in different times at once. His loving offerings to the memories of New York’s grand movie theaters of the past, crossed with his thoroughly contemporary comics work, in which we are treated to his quite unique sense of humor, are both of our era and not. For Yoichiro Yoda, the world is haunted by the ghosts of then and now. Learn more about Yoda at his website.

Space is limited at the opening reception, so please reserve your spot through NowHere’s Eventbrite page.

Eliza’s Birthday Party by Yoichiro Yoda

About NowHere

NowHere is a hub for emerging Japanese artists. The focus of the SoHo gallery is on creatives who come from Japan to New York City, whether for a visit or to stay. They feature work from a broad spectrum of media, from digital to fashion, culinary arts to photography, and everything in between. NowHere is dedicated to building community and expanding their artists’ networks.

NowHere is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. No appointment required.

For more information, please visit NowHere’s website.

Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art

Now through Sunday, September 10

Poster House – 119 W. 23rd Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)

Admission: $12 | $8 Seniors, Students, Educators, Veterans, and Visitors with Disabilities

Japanese poster design reflects the country’s rich visual culture and printmaking tradition and was used throughout the 20th century to represent the country to domestic and international audiences. Two world wars in addition to rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass media fundamentally transformed modern Japan, and its specific journey as both an aggressor and a victim of war reinforced the nation’s efforts to revamp its image. Within this context, posters became an essential commercial art form that fused modern identity with consumerism, mirroring and shaping the social, political, and ideological values of the time. 

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and World War II (1939–45), posters were designed to inspire patriotism, circulate propaganda, and encourage consumer restraint in support of the war effort. During the postwar period, however, unparalleled growth in the manufacturing sector catapulted the Japanese economy to the position of second largest in the world, creating limitless opportunities for poster advertising as Japanese corporations became household names and global brands. Following the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka World Expo, Japan’s international standing shifted again, emboldening Japanese artists and designers to conceive new forms of graphic media that mixed aspects of traditional Japanese aesthetics with Western design idioms. Between the 1980s and the early 21st century, Japanese posters functioned beyond the realm of the merely commercial, allowing designers to address such social issues as pollution, climate change, sustainability, nuclear disarmament, and global peace and reconciliation. 

This exhibition explores the cultural and political shifts within modern Japan that influenced the functions and messaging of its advertising posters, and how those posters were subsequently received by the public.

Nihon Buyo UCLA Asian Performing Arts Institute 1981

Gallery Hours

Poster House is open Thursday through Sunday from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., except on Friday, when it is open until 9:00 p.m. Admission is free on Fridays as well. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit Poster House’s website.

Made in Japan in the Poster House Shop

Poster House has a nice selection of books, notecards, and other items that feature Japanese graphic design. To purchase online, visit the shop here.