GALLERY MoMo is pleased to present “ARATENO”, a group exhibition featuring works by Masakazu Takatori, CHEN Shige, and Yuka Hotta, on view from Saturday, September 13 to Saturday, October 18, 2025.

The exhibition was conceived and curated by Yosuke Kobashi, an artist represented by the gallery. Beyond his own practice, Kobashi has visited and closely observed numerous exhibitions by other artists. Through conversations with him, we realized that his way of looking at artists, artworks, and exhibitions is unique and offers fresh perspectives that are often overlooked. While exhibitions curated by artists themselves have become increasingly common in recent years, ARATENO reflects Kobashi’s own words — “showing what had not been visible, a breeze that blows through stagnation” — and is structured around the shared quality of “nuke” (a sense of openness or release) that he perceives in both works and exhibitions.

In addition, the flyer design and exhibition goods, created by inori at Kobashi’s request, also capture and embody this lightness of “nuke.” Their design brings a different angle to the exhibition, introducing a distinct rhythm and sense of movement.

Freed from existing frameworks, concepts, and methods of expression, the three participating artists confront their inner selves and create continuous bodies of work through diverse approaches. We invite you to experience the exhibition space, where these works are displayed in dialogue, like an improvisational session.

ARATENO

Arateno — A Breath of Wind Blowing Through the Stagnation, Revealing What Had Been Unseen

Light flickers, eyes wander, the brain feels a pleasant thrill. Thank you.

Or perhaps, it is something entirely new—your chest tightens, it feels unbearable, the brain is in turmoil. I begin to think.

Adults are often moved by what children create.

It is “something” they once could do themselves, but no longer can.

There are adults searching for that “something” within, seeking freedom in order to remain true to themselves.

To accept contradictions within oneself, to walk without purpose, simply to walk.

It is not about returning to childhood.

To be free means to be oneself—of that time, in that moment.

And so, it is in the things created by those who are always in dialogue with themselves that we long to see something.

Yosuke Kobashi

Arateno — “Nuke” (Open Space / Breathing Room)

That sensation reaching straight into the marrow. A respect and awe so strong that one cannot help but think: thank you for taking it this far.

Chen Shige and Yuuka Hotta belong to a generation that moves freely, unbound by whether to make an installation or not, whether it’s a painting or a drawing, on the floor or the wall—never stumbling over trivial categories, but instead speaking beyond them.

Their shared quality lies in continuity and persuasive accumulation, but it is their freshness combined with a meticulous sense of balance in every detail that captivates.

Through skillful subtraction—each in a different way—they generate a sense of nuke (openness, release, a space of breathing).

Masakazu Takatori, being of my own generation, struck me differently: not with freshness, but with the persistence of addition that seems to destroy balance, and yet somehow still gives rise to nuke.

Nuke, whether deliberate or unconscious, is deeply tied to the artist’s sensibility. The more skills we acquire, the more we age, the harder it becomes to perceive.

And then there is Inori’s design, embodying nuke with equal lightness. Lightness and nuke are the common thread among the four who make up this exhibition.

As the sensibilities of the four resonate with one another—persistent, yet light—the exhibition Arateno may reach into someone’s very marrow. (With pray.)

Yosuke Kobashi

Due to various circumstances, I was unable to find time to focus on creating and exhibiting works for about ten years.

Recently, however, I have finally been able to make time and have resumed my practice.

Focusing on creation after such a long break, I find myself truly unable to resist the joy of painting.

This is the feeling behind these paintings.

Masakazu Takatori

I create works with a focus on the arrangement, boundaries, and coexistence of painting, line, and linguistic description, while remaining conscious of phenomena such as discommunication, multilingual societies, the visual imagery of bargains (compression of images), and literacy in language and symbols.

Recently, I have been particularly interested in modes of depiction in pictorial expressions on paper, methods of description in multilingual manga, and the possibilities of an exophonic aesthetics.

CHEN Shige

I have continued to think while constantly overlapping my own body with the existence of painting—something that can reach endlessly outward, yet also remain endlessly in place.

Where do the contours that define my very self begin and end? How is it possible to hold onto and leave behind something that is in a state of perpetual flux?

For me, the act of painting is an act of assuming and confirming a form or a place for a body that has no fixed location. On limited-volume supports such as sheets of plywood, I hypothesize fragments of such a rootless body, give them shape, and leave them behind in drawn form, as if to repeatedly verify their existence. I construct the surface as though mending a body—incorporating the friction between pencil and support, the splinters and tremors it produces. At times, I deform the support itself, letting it interfere with the space, thereby mending the space in which these shifting entities between painting and body exist.

I allow myself to be pulled by the weight of my own body as I draw, by the conditions of the support and of the space. By endlessly pursuing this dynamic between painting and myself, I attempt to reconstruct ways of being for painting and the body that have long fallen outside the bounds of language.

Yuka Hotta