GALLERY MoMo Ryogoku will hold Tomoko Konoike's solo exhibition "Medicine Infrastructure via Map​, Tomoko Konoike's Summer School" from Sunday, August 2 to Sunday, September 6.

Coinciding with her 2020 solo exhibition at the Artizon Museum, Tomoko Konoike has continued to create work through these past several years shaped by COVID-19, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the invasion of Ukraine, the Noto Peninsula earthquake, and Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai.

In Ringwanderung, ongoing since 2019 at Oshima Seishoen as part of the Setouchi Triennale, she has continued working through the "maintenance" of the forest along a 1.5 km loop path dug into the island's mountain in Showa 3 (1928). In The Birth of Seeing, ongoing since 2020, she has worked together with curators and visitors to reorganize a museum built around visual priority into a space for bodily appreciation, and has also begun reconsidering the way collecting works has served as a method of historical succession, from the perspective of human making.

For The Storytelling Curtain Project, with the cooperation of craft volunteers from across Japan under the idea of placing "one small handmade thing in each room," curtains were made for the 166 temporary housing units built after the 2025 Noto Peninsula earthquake, with embroidery motifs drawn from the poetry of Ukrainian war refugees. For Konoike, encountering and working with these entirely new "materials" was a first in every sense — yet, as is true for anyone, this is no different from simply living an ordinary life.

And Medicine Infrastructure, which began around the end of 2023, is like a faint path running through the foundation of all these activities. It is an attempt to have the general public keep and live alongside her works; at present, including the ten Wolf Benches shown at last year's Expo, Konoike's works are leaving the storerooms and beginning to be lent out, free of charge, to facilities and private households in various places.

This exhibition, also serving as a report on these past several years, maps out Konoike's movements to explore why this unique framework came into being, offering an overview of her work through plan sketches, materials, texts, photographs, and video documentation. New works in progress — including Wolf Benches and finger puppets — will also be on view, along with small talks and reading sessions. We warmly invite you to bring friends and visit this summer school in Ryogoku, Tokyo's own summer retreat.

Summer School: New teachers are born every session

A project lab titled "New teachers are born every session," born out of Tomoko Konoike: Medicine Infrastructure at the Aomori Museum of Art, brings together people from a wide range of fields in dialogue with Konoike's work. Here we introduce the teachers who will take part this time.

Summer School Vol. 1

Friday, August 7, 17:00–19:00

Talk Title: "A Story of a Thousand People Striking Iron"

New teacher: Leo Fujisawa (sculptor) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

This time we welcome sculptor Leo Fujisawa, a friend from Hokkaido, for a small talk.

Leo has held workshops across the country in which many people strike heated iron with a hammer. He says more than two thousand people, of all ages, have now had the experience of hammering iron. What struck him anew, he says, was the discovery that "anyone can hammer iron."

People differ in what they can and cannot do, in what they are good and not good at — yet iron can still be struck. This happens when material, tool, and the living body align and take hold of the earth. There is nothing more satisfying than that. Which made me think: perhaps that is why we have lived alongside iron all along.

Our bodies as living creatures are all different. Tools are what connect the hand to what exists in the natural world. I'd like to hear more about that.

Leo Fujisawa Born in 1974 in Toyako, Abuta District, Hokkaido. Graduated from the Department of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, Dohto University in 1997. Currently a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Cultural Anthropology at Hokkaido University.

Working across craft, sculpture, installation, and stage design, he uses a range of materials including iron, wood, and fiber. Against the backdrop of his own view of life and death, he has consistently engaged with profound themes: the iron sculpture series Passage, built around seed motifs; The Presence of Absence, thread sculptures that make visible hidden elements of daily life; Quiet Days, made of iron wire and focused on everyday happiness; and, in recent years, Sculptures of Place, which reflect on the origins of human survival and the emergence of place.

Summer School Vol. 2

Saturday, August 8, 17:00–19:00

Talk Title: "A Small Classroom in Estonia"

New teacher: Mayako Murai (fairy-tale researcher) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

Last November, Konoike held a finger-puppet workshop titled Hand Puppets Traveling Between Forests and Humans with students from the University of Tartu, in the Baltic state of Estonia, at Raadi Cemetery. First, in Japan, Konoike asked each student only for their name, transformed its pronunciation into a "spell," and made the heads of finger puppets based on the imagery of that spell. She then sent these puppet heads and spells to the students in Tartu, who each made their puppet's body and clothing before the day of the workshop. Meanwhile, Konoike searched Google Maps in advance for a "forest" in which to hold the class, and after arriving in Estonia, spent several days walking the streets of Tartu in search of a forest of the right size.

This time, we welcome Mayako Murai, who helped plan this class together with Konoike, for a conversation — accompanied by documentary photographs — about forests, names, puppets, graves, and mother tongues. She will also report on her participation in St. Martin's Fair, Estonia's largest craft fair, held in the capital Tallinn, where she exhibited The Storytelling Table Runner and collected stories.

Mayako Murai is a researcher of fairy-tale culture. Her books include From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West (2015) and Entangled Paths: Multispecies Fairy Tales in Art and Illustration (2026), and she edited Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures (2020). She curated the exhibitions Fur Story: Tomoko Konoike (Leeds Arts University, 2018) and Storymakers in Contemporary Japanese Art (Japan Foundation Sydney Gallery, 2022). She is currently working on the Multispecies Fairy-Tale Library project, reading fairy tales from around the world as stories in which multiple species are entangled, pursuing collaborative research across various fields, and holding picture-book exhibitions and reading groups at libraries and galleries. She keeps bees on the roof of her home.

Summer School Vol. 3

Friday, August 21, 17:00–18:00

Talk Title: "Games Are Not Just Play"

New teacher: Koichi Oyama (game designer) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

We welcome master game designer Koichi Oyama for card games and conversation.

On the second floor of a mixed-use building in Shibuya, Oyama and Konoike once sat at neighboring desks at a small toy-planning company. Oyama was in charge of designing the "GeGeGe no Kitaro House," while Konoike was in charge of the Japanese version of the "Barbie House," which Bandai had taken on from Mattel. There, some ten-odd young designers — graduates of design and industrial schools — worked planning and designing sentai-robot-type toys, Transformers-type toys, figures, card and board games, preschool toys, and early Famicom games. This was before the word "otaku" even existed. Generally speaking, children were seen as entirely outside adult society, and toys and their design were treated, like children themselves, as something "immature." That company later closed, but toy design undoubtedly left a great mark on both of them.

Under Oyama's direction, Konoike has since created card games using characters from her own works, such as "Spirit Old Maid" and "Winter Karuta," as well as the workshop "Drawing Stones," and has held them at museums. On the day, while playing these games together, we'll hear about how card games are structured and what distinguishes a game from mere play.

Koichi Oyama handled the game design (rules of play) for the Pokémon Trading Card Game and served as art director (character design, pixel art, and more) for MOTHER2: Gyiyg Strikes Back. He now works under his own game brand, "Oyama Game," single-handedly creating more than fifty card games — design, illustration, and packaging all his own.

Since 2013 he has been a visiting professor at Seian University of Art and Design, teaching workshop classes.

In recent years his major game-design work has included analog games such as "Pokémon Old Maid," "Pokémon Taruka," and "Pokémon Shushushu!"

Summer School Vol. 4

Saturday, August 22, 16:30–18:40

Title: "A Good Wind Blows Through Architecture and Design"

New teachers: Hideharu Asanuma (architect; President, Team ZOO Atelier Mobile; Vice Chair, NPO Yūkei Design Organization) × Junko Ogawa (graphic designer) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

Since the Tōhoku earthquake, I met architect Hideharu Asanuma again on August 6, 2023, at Sōma Station on the Jōban Line in Fukushima Prefecture.

I had been thinking about whether it might be possible to build a "slide" using the slope of the 6-meter seawalls (running for hundreds of kilometers) along the Tōhoku Pacific coast — something people could use to play at diving into the sea — and I often mentioned this, half as idle chat, during breaks from work. That it came up as idle chat was really the reverse side of how serious I was about it, because I assumed no one would take such an outlandish plan seriously. But Asanuma responded that he found the plan interesting. And it was graphic designer Junko Ogawa who casually showed him my sketch of the plan. (Ogawa always tosses things quietly in the right direction, without anyone noticing.)

So it was decided that we would actually go and inspect the seawall at Sōma. Mr. Endo, a dependable local who fishes for sea lettuce along the Sōma coast and also farms, drove us there. Endo has a good nose for things. Sitting in the front passenger seat of the car he drove, I was reunited with Asanuma — in the back seat — for the second time in about seven years. Amid brief greetings exchanged across the seats, I remember we talked about the slide, about gravity, about not cutting ourselves off from the sea, about not turning the seawall into an insulator, and about the concrete foundation. Within those few minutes, I could see the vision.

At the end of that year, together with Asanuma, Ogawa, and the people of Sōma, we "launched" my 12-meter-wide work Kawatonbi (Skin Kite) into the hills behind Endo's house. A workshop is like a warm-up for a day that will eventually come.

Architects and designers take a vision — one I hold firmly in my grasp, though it does not yet exist here — and design a physical framework for it, direct the flow of paths, give it gravity, and set it down into the social infrastructure. I'd like to hear, while looking at their work, something of the ideas that underlie each of theirs.

— Tomoko Konoike

Hideharu Asanuma is an architect, president of Team ZOO Atelier Mobile, and vice chair of the NPO Yūkei Design Organization. His approach is characterized by repeated on-site fieldwork and resident-participation workshops, deriving architecture from a place's context and discoveries. He has run numerous space-making workshops in Japan and abroad, and works broadly beyond architectural design, including in stage design for theater and dance. Through his participation in the artist-in-residence program "BanART1939," he expanded his base of activity to Yokohama, where he continues his community-rooted practice.

Junko Ogawa is a graphic designer. After working at the design office of Yoshihisa Shirai, she went independent in 2010. She works mainly on art collections and books on the humanities and scholarship, as well as promotional materials and exhibition catalogues for art exhibitions. She has also occasionally designed catalogues and books for Tomoko Konoike.

In Koganei, Tokyo, she runs "SHOSYO," a space that serves as both her office and a place for thinking about all things related to books. She also teaches typography and book design as a part-time lecturer at Tama Art University, among other roles.

Summer School Vol. 5

Saturday, August 29, 16:30–18:00

Reading and Talk Title: "The Birth of Seeing": A Reading and Talk

New teacher: Osamu Tsukasa ("just an ordinary person") × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

Looking back on her work on Oshima as part of the Setouchi Triennale, Konoike will read aloud from a book of oral accounts once kept in the library of Oshima Seishoen, a former Hansen's disease sanatorium, compiled by its association of blind residents.

We are also pleased to welcome a special guest, Osamu Tsukasa. A novelist, painter, and designer of book covers for numerous novelists, Tsukasa (whose own profile reads simply, "just an ordinary person") will join Konoike to speak about war, the postwar years, disasters, and what it means for human beings to "play." Conversations between Tsukasa and myself have always been rather mismatched, like children talking past each other, so we haven't often held a dialogue in public. But perhaps it is precisely because our conversation is childlike that it has always somehow connected. This time, Tsukasa plans to speak about A Medieval Town Born on a Riverbank, which he made with historian Yoshihiko Amino in 1988, alongside talk of my wolf-fur exhibition.

I'm not yet sure what form the reading will take, but I too am very curious. I hope you'll look forward to it.

— Tomoko Konoike

References

I Lived Here: A Fifty-Year History of the Blind Association at the National Sanatorium Oshima Seishoen (1984, Oshima Seishoen)

A Medieval Town Born on a Riverbank, text by Yoshihiko Amino, illustrations by Osamu Tsukasa (Iwanami Shoten)

The Magic of Books by Osamu Tsukasa (Hakusuisha)

Summer School Vol. 6

Sunday, August 30, 15:00–17:00

Talk Title: "When a Picture Happens: A Badger Curator Grasps Works Through Drawing"

New teacher: Rieko Sakamoto (curator, Saison Museum of Modern Art) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

We welcome Rieko Sakamoto, curator at the Saison Museum of Modern Art, to look back on a kind of thoroughgoing "play" between artist and curator rarely seen at other museums — tracing back to her 2006 solo exhibition at the Ohara Museum of Art, and continuing through her 2009 solo show at Tokyo Opera City and the 2015 exhibition Primal Violence. Since Konoike's 2024 solo exhibition at the Aomori Museum of Art, Sakamoto has also begun making her own works — drawing pictures and sewing fabric. Rather than explaining a work in words, someone who has felt a work conveys it to someone else through their own making. We'd like to introduce the work of curating itself, and a curator who brings so much joy to it. Please feel free to join us.

Rieko Sakamoto works mainly in contemporary art, organizing exhibitions and building museum archives. She has been involved in numerous projects with Tomoko Konoike since 2006, served as planner and guest curator for the exhibition Primal Violence (2015–2016), and for the exhibition Medicine Infrastructure (2024) created and exhibited an "exchange" with Konoike expressed through animal language and drawing.

Summer School Vol. 7

Saturday, September 5, 16:00–18:00

Talk Title: "Don't Go Outside, You'll Catch Cold" (mizuree kara soto ni deruna, a local dialect phrase)

New teacher: Atsuko Mizutani (former ENT clinic physician) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

I met Mizutani several years ago, when a deaf friend showed me a book by the painter Katsumi Hashimoto, Katsumi's Picture Diary. I was immediately drawn to the manga-like lines in his drawings — something like footprints of some kind — and became hooked on how strange and funny they were. The book's publisher turned out to be Warashi no Kai (The Straw Sandals Association), a disability-support organization run by Mizutani, whose motto, I'm told, is for people with and without disabilities to go out into the city and live together.

Katsumi has multiple disabilities, including deafblindness and paraplegia, yet travels boldly around the neighboring towns in his wheelchair and records it all in his diary. I sometimes behave rather roughly and bluntly myself, so as a reader I secretly felt a kinship with him. I also became interested in the sheer, wonderfully eccentric variety of contributors to the monthly Warashi no Kai bulletin, and gradually got to talking with Mizutani, who compiles it. Building on the activities of Warashi no Kai, founded in 1978, Mizutani and others established the social welfare corporation Tsugumi Kyōseikai in 1996, and built the day-service (daily-living support) facility Kurashi Center Beshimi in the middle of the rice fields of Koshigaya.

This talk's title, "Don't go outside, you'll catch cold," is a phrase Mizutani told me about when I asked her about the origin of the name Tsugumi.

"They say the name 'Tsugumi' comes from a local Koshigaya dialect word, tsugumu, meaning to stay quietly holed up in a room. Perhaps it referred to people with disabilities crouching down, staying 'tsugunde' — quietly shut in — without going outside. Everyone from that generation has now passed away, but many of the people around at the time had lived confined to their houses, told by their farming families, 'Don't go outside, you'll catch cold.'"

This time, I'd like to ask Mizutani about her days as a medical student in Tokyo during the student movement, about the time she moved to Saitama, and about the sisters who lived shut away in the back room of a farmhouse in Koshigaya.

— Tomoko Konoike

Atsuko Mizutani Born in 1942 in Tsu City, Mie Prefecture. In 1958 she moved to the outskirts of Tokyo. In 1969, after a year and a half boycotting graduation exams during the student movement, she graduated. After working at a university hospital, she opened her own ENT clinic in Kasukabe, Saitama Prefecture, in 1977. In 1978, together with people with disabilities, she founded Warashi no Kai under the mottoes "let's go out into the city" and "let's live in the community" — an activity that continues to this day. In 2024, following the COVID-19 pandemic, she closed her clinic.

Summer School Vol. 8

Sunday, September 6, 13:30–15:30 — Three-Way Talk and Presentation

Title: "Collections and Living Things"

New teachers: Tomoko Yabumae (curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) × Yuko Mizuta (curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) × Tomoko Konoike (artist)

On this final day, we finally take up, with full resolve, the subject of human making and the earth.

I first met Yabumae, one of this session's new teachers, last October, at a talk event for the exhibition A Personal View of Contemporary Japanese Art: The Ryutaro Takahashi Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Standing before the exhibited work Kawadonchō (2015), we were talking about the earthquake and the work, and — perhaps because the exhibition was drawn from the holdings of one of Japan's leading contemporary art collectors — I found myself saying something like: "The mission that modern museums were founded on, of collecting and preserving works as a way of passing on history, has become completely incompatible with today's global environment." If artists keep making work and museums keep collecting it, the earth itself — as a kind of "warehouse" — will one day fill up and reach its limit. Of course, this wasn't something we could fully discuss within the time we had, and a faint tension remained between us after the talk ended. I thought that would probably be the end of that particular conversation, since public institutions, including museums, had never really taken up the fundamental question of collecting itself.

But not long after, I heard from Yabumae and from Mizuta, who handles collections at the museum, asking whether we might talk a little more about this theme. That surprised me somewhat. But I could sense a real seriousness from both of them. And so I had another occasion to think again about "collecting" and "ownership."

What I came to understand was that people working in museums were, in their own way, similarly troubled by questions about how to go on collecting works in the future. And the conversation extended beyond museums, to how many of us — myself included — struggle with what to do with the belongings left behind by family members. The idea of passing on history — human (and only human) history — which we had never questioned, is now producing its own contradictions through the sheer excess of things we ourselves create. The globalization of modernization since the Industrial Revolution has accelerated production and supplied the earth's surface with things. Fundamentally, that hasn't changed today. And my own work is, of course, part of that. Caught up in production, I had simply left unexamined the question of how works — and the earth's living things — are to go on living.

This time, I'd like to ask Yabumae and Mizuta candidly about the current state of museum collections and about what functions museums should serve going forward. And for my part, I want to propose a project — directed at the museum as a social system — for how we might think about works and their documentation from now on. It is still an immature, early-stage plan, but rather than offering philosophical persuasion or a message, I'd like this to be a starting point for something concrete.

I feel that within the themes of "collecting" and "ownership" lies something that matters deeply to each person's individual life, to the environment around us — including natural disasters and war — and to living things as a whole.

— Tomoko Konoike