Being There
December 6, 2025 – January 24, 2026
KOTARO NUKAGA Three
N project will present Rei Kizumoto’s solo exhibition ‘Being There’ at KOTARO NUKAGA Three from December 6, 2025 to January 24, 2026
Born in Shiga Prefecture in 1998, Rei Kizumoto completed her MA in Oil Painting, Kyoto University of the Arts in 2023. She is currently based in the Kansai region. Her practice involves cutting felt—a material strongly tied to her childhood memories—into random shapes, tossing them, and creating paintings based on the resulting layout.
When we stand before Kizumoto’s paintings, we find ourselves searching for words. The felt is tied to memories of toys her mother used to make for her when she was young—magical scraps that could become anything. Kizumoto randomly cuts and colors this felt, tosses it onto the floor, and transposes the resulting overlaps of shape and intersections of color onto the canvas. It is as if she is embracing contingency.
The viewer first perceives the colors and shapes that inhabit the canvas. Pink, yellow, green. Curves, straight lines, organic contours. It might suggest a landscape or a map, or perhaps simply a play of color and form. We try to fit it to something we know: “Is this a flower?” “That looks like the shape of a hill.” However, this attempt is met with a pleasant betrayal. Kizumoto’s paintings softly elude a hasty understanding, as if they resist being labeled with meaning.
It may be akin to the moment we first encountered the world—an innocent wonder, simply gazing at things that do not yet have names. Kizumoto’s paintings gently return us to a place where our sensibility quietly awakens. Here, logical analysis and intellectual interpretation fade into the background.
What fills the canvas is, perhaps, the joy of striving to be pure color and form（the signifier）, liberated from descriptive words（the signified）. It is the rich resonance of the signifier itself—the sign-expression. Using the soft, warm material of felt as a guide, Kizumoto transcribes this resonance onto the canvas.
In our highly developed information society, the speed of information only accelerates, and the distance between “apprehension“（grasping the signifier = “to be conveyed“）and “comprehension“（reaching the signified = “to be understood“）grows ever shorter.
While our superficial, technical distance from the world has dramatically shrunk, our essential, spiritual distance has instead grown further apart—as suggested by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage du sensible （the term “political partition of speech from noise”）. Kizumoto, through her unique creative process, introduces “slowness” into our overly accelerated information society.
g
d
o
The individual letters “g,” “d,” and “o” exist just there as shapes and sounds, detached from meaning. However, when arranged in sequence as “dog” or “god,” they prompt an understanding of the concepts “dog” or “God.” While this accurately conveys information within the shared system of the English language, the potential worlds created by spellings like “ogd” or “gdo” are left behind. The felt scattered on the floor is like these randomly placed alphabets. The artist affirms the existence of these elements that are “being there” as part of the sensible thing.
Kizumoto slows the speed of information, widening the distance between “being conveyed” and “being understood” to make a space for the sensible things. This is a new place to reclaim our sensibilities amidst the speed of our information-saturated lives.
She is not offering a completed narrative. Rather, through a “poetics of delay,” she composes “things that are just there” on the threshold of “comprehension” allowing them to resonate as worldly possibilities. The yet-unheard sounds and the words left behind, gathered upon the canvas, overlap the momentary with the eternal on a single horizon, weaving together multiple worlds in this quiet space.
ARTIST
DATE
December 6, 2025 – January 24, 2026 11:30 – 18:00（Tue – Sat） *Closed on Sun, Mon and Public Holidays *Winter Holidays: December 27, 2025 – January 5, 2026 Opening Reception: 6 December, 2025 16:00 – 18:00 *Rei Kizumoto will be present.
VENUE