ついたよ（Tsuitayo）: Becoming by Making
March 14 – April 10, 2026
KOTARO NUKAGA Roppongi
KOTARO NUKAGA Roppongi is pleased to present ‘Tsuitayo: Becoming by Making’, a two-person exhibition by Kazuhito Kawai and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, from March 14 to April 10, 2026.
Known for ceramics marked by pop, dynamic colors and forms, Kawai works in dialogue with the plasticity of clay and the contingencies of firing. Through dyeing, printing, stitching, and layering, Hatanaka treats washi as a second skin, giving material form to embodied experience.
“ついたよ（Tsuitayo）” is an everyday phrase that carries both the feeling of “arriving somewhere” and the nuance of “setting off from here” with the person you are meeting. In this exhibition, the practices of these two artists—who have continuously transformed themselves through the ongoing acts of kneading clay, dyeing paper, and making—intersect at an open point that moves back and forth between arrival and departure.
The following text was written for this exhibition by independent curator Sophie Mayuko Arni.
Porous Minds, Porous Materials
Imagine that you have now attained everything you ever dreamed of. The magazines you read, the movies and TV shows you watched, the screenshots of aspirational lifestyles, the Saved posts of your Instagram. Your doom scrolling has now materialized in three dimensional reality. Your ideal life is now here waiting for you, all at once. Your ideal home. Your ideal neighborhood. Your happiest memories. Your favorite people. What does this patchwork of dreams look like? A little fuzzy, I think. Too many subgenres mixed together. It does not look as coherent as you had imagined. Worst yet: you have everything you ever wanted, but something is still missing.
Then comes the down period. The self-doubt, the self-loathing. Environmental anxiety. Social anxiety. What are all these dreams for, anyway? Why even dream at all, if the images are so out of touch with my current reality? Why start anything, when others are way more technically and intellectually gifted and will succeed faster than I do? Will my dreams be accepted by the groups I belong to? Will I even thrive if my dreams come true? Why start anything new, if I already know happiness is not guaranteed at the end?
This is the story of two artists: Kazuhito Kawai and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka. Both attained authentic, personal, freedom of expression after long periods of adversity. They stopped dreaming, they stopped loathing, and instead they took the radical decision to start doing. They overcame their depressive periods by making objects by hand – objects that do not fit neatly in boxes in their trans-materiality and trans-disciplinary approaches. They imprinted their porous minds onto porous materials.
Kazuhito Kawai is a contemporary ceramicist and multidisciplinary artist. Born in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, his youth was rhythmed with Japanese pop culture and Americana, emanating from the cultural, fashion, and music hubs of Shibuya and Harajuku. Kawai studied at the Chelsea College of Arts in London before eventually returning to Japan, when a long and dark period of unmaking started. Finding difficulty to process and fully express the totality of worlds he experienced and visualized, he paused his artistic practice. While he went through a period of creative silence, inside of him, a desire was slowly burning to break from monotone daily life and strict societal expectations.
At the age of 31, Kawai started to make art again. Originally trained in painting, he studied ceramics at the Kasama College of Ceramic Art in his home prefecture of Ibaraki. Kasama, a town by the mountains and rivers in the countryside, is indeed famous for its pottery. Unlike Arita ware, it is not heavily decorated. Used for daily functions, Kasama ware possesses a raw earthenware quality.
Learning the craft of firing and glazing led Kawai to explore his early memories with three-dimensionality, memories he could control in malleable form. From using pointillism techniques to painting organic shapes in vivid colors, his ceramics defy categorization yet are instantly recognizable. Retrofuturism marries ancient craft. The artificial and the handmade unite, yet in tension. Kawai’s ceramics draw on dream-like shapes, yet they are flawed, like reality. He sometimes incorporates found objects such as tea cups and broken dog ceramic in his pieces, firing them together with new clay in celebration of hybridity.
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, too, was on a personal transformation journey when she met the material of washi, traditional Japanese paper. As a Canadian-Japanese artist, growing up in Toronto, her curiosity and life circumstances led her to travel to faraway places such as the Arctic. She eventually wanted to learn more about her great-grandfather’s lineage as a fisherman. Around the same time, she had already started to use washi in her works. In 2022-23, a residency at Kashiki Seishi, a 7th-generation washi mill in Ino, in the mountainous, river-filled, and fish-filled region of Kōchi, Japan, was the key to better understand the world inside of her, after a long period of outer exploration.
Her process is recorded in a film directed by Johnny Nghiem shown during her last exhibition, ‘Patience and Persistence’ at the Embassy of Canada’s Prince Takamado Gallery (2025). In it, we see her amidst a community of master washi makers, harvesting Kozo all the way to assisting in the paper mill process. Her washi works represent a freeing period for the artist. She first dyes the paper with natural hues of blues and deep browns, and then draws shapes and patterns, sometimes with linocut prints. Some of the larger works resemble tapestries, but are in fact sewn washi, first kneaded with konnyaku, which gives them a wrinkled texture, and then stitched piece by piece. She is also seen making a washi flag and clothes for herself to wear, including tabi shoes out of washi. The film ends with a scene of her walking through Shibuya Crossing, wearing her own creations and proudly carrying a washi flag of gyotaku fishes imprint, echoing her grandfather’s heritage.
“At the time, I was using art-making as an embodied process to move through a lot of struggle in my inner landscape and emotional world. [These works show] the growing pains of following desire, orienting to pleasure and liberatory acts of expression and honesty, as well as my experiences of yearning for community and belonging,” she shares. “Loneliness and mental health manifested materially in these works at a very transformative time.”
Where Hatanaka excelled is going beyond this classic understanding of washi. Instead of an ink droplet touching the empty page, marking a careful stroke, there are hundreds of strokes, multilayered with prints, themselves over a layer of natural dye. Instead of thinking of washi as a precious decorative medium for calligraphy or painting, she initiated a direct exchange between the washi and her own body. Washi acted as a second skin: not an armor or a shield, but instead a porous cape, absorbing contact, pressure, color, pain, suffering, joy – unleashing these emotions onto material form.
As an avid consumer of culture, a curious soul, every word and image stored in physical or digital memory comes back in the magical, mythical process of making. Kawai’s references of palm trees from Hawaiian painter Christian Riese Lassen, who gained popular culture fame in Japan in the 90s, or Hatanaka’s tabi shoes and jackets, are both references stored in the artists’ minds and somehow unleashed when in front of the raw material. There is a transformative quality that Hatanaka shares with Kawai in the way both artists start with natural materials to better understand inner emotive landscapes and their connection to their homelands away from large cities – accessing the unpredictability of natural materials and their world wide webs of minds.
Porosity is measured by the ability to absorb. Sometimes, all we need are porous materials to make sense of the realities inside of us, to bring our remote dreams to life. We could interpret Kawai’s and Hatanaka’s objects as vessels into new realities, rather than reflections of dreams. Made in Ibaraki and Kōchi, the objects carry a sense of authenticity and strength, as they directly reflect the artists’ current needs and ancestral roots. The ceramics and washi vessels carry meaning in the very fact the artists touched them with pure intentions. They do not need to look or be perfect. Rather, they just need to exist, out of the artists’ minds, and into the physical world.
Reflecting back on the title of the exhibition, Kawai shares: “ついたよ（Tsuitayo） is a common Japanese saying meaning ‘I’m here. I made it’. What I like is that it doesn’t specify where you arrived, or whether this is the final destination, a meeting point, or a comeback. It leaves space for imagination.”
The reality is that a creative life – just like a painting, a ceramic vase, a sculpture, a tapestry, a dress – is built in stages. Making sure that at every stage, the ground is solid enough to add another layer, is the only duty we may claim to have. Becoming is a creative act. More often than not, the best results are unexpected.
Text by Sophie Mayuko Arni, Independent Curator（Tokyo / Abu Dhabi）
ARTIST
DATE
March 14 – April 10, 2026 11:30 – 18:00（Tue – Sat） *Closed on Sun, Mon and Public Holidays *Special Closure: March 21 Opening Reception: March 14, 2026 16:00 – 18:00 *Kazuhito Kawai and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka will be present.
VENUE