Aya Kurashiki “My Grandmother Lived Alone in the Old House.”

Friday, October 3 – Saturday, October 18, 2025.

Aya Kurashiki “My Grandmother Lived Alone in the Old House.”
Friday, October 3 – Saturday, October 18, 2025 13:00–19:00
Closed Sundays, Mondays, and holidays
Opening Reception ：Friday, October 3, 18:00–20:00
Venue: LAG (LIVE ART GALLERY)
Daiwa Jingumae Bldg. 1F, 2-4-11 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001

LAG is pleased to present My Grandmother Lived Alone in the Old House, a solo exhibition by Aya Kurashiki, on view from Friday, October 3 to Saturday, October 18, 2025.

Aya Kurashiki is an artist whose practice begins with fundamental themes such as the distance and alienation between self and others, life and death, impermanence, and corporeality. Incorporating religious and ritualistic elements, she works primarily through transfer techniques using photographic and Western painting imagery. By employing a variety of supports such as fabric, stone, and mirrors, she continues a visual exploration of existence and the body, drawing on accidental traces and multilayered compositions.

The works in this exhibition take as their point of departure the memories and traces inscribed in the Western-style house where Kurashiki’s grandmother once lived, seeking to visualize the lingering resonance of time and existence.

In a self-portrait wearing her grandmother’s clothing, the figure of the granddaughter becomes at once the shadow of the deceased, layering different temporalities within a single site. The house’s interior, transferred onto mirrors, recalls the ancient belief that mirrors can capture spirits—inviting phantoms while simultaneously reflecting the viewer as “someone who was once there.” In addition, the figure of the artist’s father, working in a room still used today as his office, is presented as the sole act that ties the house to the present. Within these works, the material decay of the building coexists with the persistence of memory, and there lingers a sense that the grandmother continues to guard the house even as it withers. Invisible time accumulates, and the past and present once more converge within this space.

Curated by: Yoshitaro Inami (Curator, Arts Maebashi)

PROFILE

Aya Kurashiki

Born in Hyogo, Japan in 1993. Currently based in Ibaraki, working between Tokyo and the Kansai region. She completed her M.A. in Painting at Kyoto University of Art and Design (now Kyoto University of the Arts) in 2018, and her M.F.A. in Oil Painting at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2020. She was a 26th-term scholarship recipient of the Sato International Cultural Scholarship Foundation, a 3rd-term fellow of the Kuma Foundation, and was selected as an Associate Artist for the VIVA AWARD in 2021.

She has consistently worked with the awareness that the body, as an individual material entity or as defined by imposed categorizations, is one of those solitary existences that are absolutely severed. She has been creating works concerning the distance between herself and others, where various frictions arise in the relationship between self and others, leaving her with solitary challenges. For her, art is an act of faith: both a bridge that connects her severed body with others, and a form of care that tends to the wounds inflicted by such frictions in order to endure. Her motifs range from broad domains such as religion, gender, death, and corporeality, to more immediate realms such as work and family, exploring the communities and acts of care that accompany them. While transfer-based works on canvas form the core of her practice, she also creates ritualistic installations and performances centered on shared meals.

Her works include Kusōzu (Nine Stages of a Decaying Corpse) and Anointing for Each Other, which take as motifs the Buddhist painting Kusōzu, Ono no Komachi who was cited as its model, and Mary Magdalene—who, like Komachi, bore imposed sins as her image turned into legend and wandered independently, disregarding her individual personality. Other works include Transition, in which pornographic images are collaged onto the bodies of women in famous paintings; Grave and Bury, works with box-shaped supports likened to graves or urns; installations such as We Are Family and Oral Distance, dining tables resembling altars; and performances and workshops such as Banquet and Maintaining Order, which involve ritualized acts of eating and drinking.

Major awards include the Grand Prize at the WATOWA ART AWARD 2021, the Yūshi Akimoto Prize at the KAIKA TOKYO AWARD, and selection for the Gunma Biennale for Young Artists.

Selected solo exhibitions include Your Hair That Once Was (haku, Kyoto, 2023), Hundred Nights (SOM GALLERY, Tokyo, 2023), and When Your Bones Creak (ARTDYNE, Tokyo, 2025).

Selected group exhibitions include New Mutation #5: Aya Kurashiki and Ryo Nishimura “Transition of Things” (Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, 2023), Dancing in the Boundary (NEWoMan Yokohama, Kanagawa, 2024–25), and Intersection (HWA’S GALLERY, Shanghai).

Selected art fairs include Art Fair Philippines (The Link, Ayala Center, Philippines, 2024), ART FAIR ASIA FUKUOKA (Fukuoka International Center, 2024), and HANKYU ART FAIR (Hankyu Umeda Hall, Osaka, 2024).

She actively works both in Japan and internationally.