Akiko Ueda, Gentaro Ishizuka, and Keita Morimoto will participate ‘Worlding − No Oars, No Shore,’ at POLA MUSEUM ANNEX
We are pleased to announce POLA MUSEUM ANNEX will present ‘Worlding — No Oars, No Shore,’ from June 12 to July 5, 2026. The exhibition will feature Akiko Ueda, Gentaro Ishizuka and Keita Morimoto, each offering a distinct mode through which a world comes into being.
Worlding － No Oars, No Shore,
A single thread, trembling.
Waves rise, fold, become countless folds. At each crease, a world.
In one world, colors strike colors, reaching toward form, only to become undone again. In one world, a familiar city under artificial light. Multiple nights folded into one place. In yet another, something white drifts in the dark, the water returning its image. Seen or unseen, they are there.
The three worlds are not connected. Yet they come from the same thread. When they exist in one space, still contradicting, a world is born between them. A world is born no other way.
No oars, no shore,
Only waves.
The seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz held that within the intellect of God there exists an infinite number of logically non-contradictory worlds, and that the one possessing the highest degree of completeness was selected and actualized. The reality in which we live is but one among countless possibilities that might have been. In the eighteenth century, Breitinger brought this conception into the domain of art, defining the artist as one who, through the medium of the work, brings into being a “possible world”—a world that would have been actualized had God made a different choice. In our present era, in which we consume realities individually optimized by algorithms, the practice of the artist takes on renewed weight as an active creation of that other world.
This exhibition is an attempt to fold three possible worlds of differing scales into a single space, through the distinct media of painting and photography. The paintings of Akiko Ueda present an organic world that unfolds infinitely within the minute interior of the “I”—a world that could not exist without human consciousness and action. Keita Morimoto, splicing together multiple places and moments on the surface of the city illuminated by artificial light, brings forth a parallel-world everyday that appears real yet exists nowhere. The photographs of Gentaro Ishizuka capture the walls of glaciers that bear tens of thousands of years of time, the earth itself as an inescapable exterior that continues to exist whether humans are present or not.
As Deleuze observed, the world is composed of infinite folds. The “I,” the “city,” and the “earth,” far from being severed from one another, exist in continuity, like folds in a single cloth. What the three artists share is a commitment to fixing time as matter, and a conviction that the intervention of the body is indispensable to this endeavor. The layers of paint, the grain of the film, the surface of the photographic print.Their physical thickness is nothing other than a fold in which time itself has been gathered.
The three worlds are not connected. Yet they are born from the same single thread. When they exist in one space, still contradicting, another world is born between them.
【EXHIBITION DETAILS】
Worlding — No Oars, No Shore,
June 12 – July 5, 2026
11:00 – 19:00（Last admission at 18:30）
*Open every day of exhibition period.
*Entrance is free.
Venue: POLA MUSEUM ANNEX
POLA Ginza Building 3F, 1-7-7 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061, Japan
Organizer: POLA ORBIS HOLDINGS INC.
In Cooperation with: KOTARO NUKAGA
URL: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000067.000069355.html
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