EXHIBITIONS
Shogo Harada “Far Gaze”
Dates: Apr 11 – May 17, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi
Opening reception: Saturday, Apr 11, 17:00 – 19:00
Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi is pleased to present “Far Gaze,” a solo exhibition of the work of Shogo Harada, on view from Saturday, April 11 through Sunday, May 17. Following his participation in a group exhibition in March 2024, this is Harada’s first solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery and will feature approximately 11 new paintings.
Harada’s subjects convey a certain sense of psychological distance. Many of his figures are seen only from the feet down or from behind, giving no hint of their circumstances. His still lifes appear still in the truest sense, as though the objects had been abandoned where they lie. In every scene, the viewer’s presence has been effaced, and the pictorial space closes in on itself.
The subjects’ silhouettes are composed of uneven lines made with a painting knife, then further worked with a brush to produce a distinctive blur and dry-brush effect that dissolves the boundary between forms and their surroundings. Broad areas of flat color forgo the rendering of individual textures, leaving only brushstrokes and thin layers of paint visible. His intentionally limited palette, characterized by the mixing of green and purple to produce black, reduces the volume of visual information and gives the image the quality of being seen through a filter.
I have a tendency to view the scene before me as something that already belongs to the past, taking it in from a kind of detached, panoramic perspective, as if looking at a photograph. A few years ago, I found a photograph at my family home of my mother and her friends in their youth. I remember looking at it with my sister, and both of us saying, emoi [a Japanese slang term derived from “emotional,” loosely meaning “poignant” or “sentimental”]. I didn’t really know what the word meant, but I think it was the only thing that came close to capturing what we felt.
The way my mother looked like a stranger and the knowledge that this moment had once really occurred sent my imagination racing, hitting me with a pang I couldn’t quite name. At the same time, I found myself thinking that the moments I share with my friends now could look this way too, years from now. If it is the reality of a lived moment, combined with the passage of time, that stirs this feeling, then I paint in the hope that my own paintings may someday do the same.
Shogo Harada
February 2026
All of Harada’s works draw on photographs he has taken over the course of daily life. Underlying his work is the idea that painting is a way of reconstructing formative experience, and in this we see an endeavor to grasp the subtle interplay between photography and memory. It hardly needs saying that the widespread use of smartphones and digital cameras has made casually documenting our experiences second nature, profoundly shaping how those experiences enter our long-term memory. Looking back at a photograph and noticing something one was unaware of at the time is one characteristic example of the way we consume images today. Harada’s painting is an attempt to recover, on canvas, the sensory and elusive qualities that photography, with its flat transcription of reality, cannot capture. Emerging from the process of revisiting his own experiences before the canvas, his paintings incorporate the cycle of taking, accumulating, and looking back at photographs, and in doing so prompt us to reflect on how we really see the world around us.
Harada has said that he sometimes takes a photograph when he senses that others are unaware of his presence, imagining what the scene might look like without him in it. His drive to minimize his own agency as viewer opens up space onto which viewers can project their own interpretations, inviting new narratives to emerge. At the same time, because each painting originates in his own lived experience, his vantage point can never be fully erased, and a faint residue of his presence lingers in the work. When these two opposing forces surface in Harada’s paintings, they continually converge and disperse beneath the viewer’s gaze, weaving layers of color and meaning into the canvas.
Shogo Harada was born in 1997 in Kyoto Prefecture, where he currently lives and works. He graduated in 2020 with a BA (major in oil painting) from Kyoto University of Art and Design, and completed a master’s degree (MFA) in the same field at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2022. His solo exhibitions are “Ceiling gazer”, biscuit gallery, Tokyo (2024) and “mtk+ vol.20 Shogo Harada”, mtk+, Kyoto (2024). He has participated in group exhibitions including “Roadside Odyssey”, Hankyu Men’s Osaka Contemporary Art Gallery (2025); “Second Signal”, biscuit gallery, Tokyo (2025); “Group Exhibition”, Taka Ishii Gallery Maebashi, Gunma (2024); “Trees Faraway”, BEAK 585 GALLERY, Osaka (2023); and “Millennials Scale”, The Millennials Kyoto (2022).
